


Witcher

by TunaFax



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Blindshipping, Cold, Illustrated, M/M, Puzzleshipping, Slow Burn, Spooky, bad canadian gothic, we are locked in a room lets bang
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-06-10 12:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 37
Words: 64,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6956008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TunaFax/pseuds/TunaFax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sacrificing a prince to the Northern witch is not the best way to warm up the land.</p><p>Or, the one where Yugi is a very creepy captor.</p><p> </p><p>Beautifully illustrated by  <a href="http://ectology.tumblr.com/">ectology</a>! (and <a href="http://tunafax.tumblr.com/">tunafax</a>, and many wonderful tumblr artists!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

[[WITCHER]](http://tunafax.tumblr.com/post/145232088244/from-my-blindshipping-creepy-yugi-fic-witcher-x) (click)

 

His father tells him to watch out for the Witcher before Atem as much as takes his first step out of the southern country.

He hears it again from his travel companions and from his guards. He hears it in taverns along his way, from children playing murder in the streets - he hears it everywhere until it's so thoroughly engraved into his brain that he hears it in his dreams.

And the stories, oh, the _stories_ , they grow darker as the cold gets bitterer, and the higher up North he goes the more he understands about the people who tell them.

Northern country is cold and unforgiving, and its woods are as full of wolves and nightmares as the great rivers of the South are full of crocodiles and nightmares.

He can't help himself but be the idiot in every campfire story ever told. He can't help it because in the South, they tell the stories about the great and terrible Magicians, and, well, Atem is good friends with both of them.

To Atem, the Witcher is a genie in a bottle, polished with snow and hunger of the barren northern fields. And, of course, much darker wishes, and frozen bodies in the streets and starving dogs mauling their masters.

Atem can't imagine it can get much worse after he spends the night in some railroad town and wakes up snowed in as high as six inches, maybe even seven. It snows for four whole hours that day, and the northerners just laugh at him and tell him to go home when he notices that the puddles have hardened and asks if ice cubes grow from that.

It's nasty, but it's tolerable, and he goes his way with confidence. 

But the next day, his train takes him further North, and it's worse - and worse after that, and worse again.

The railroad takes him as far as the tracks can go, and he learns that his train had ran over two men who chose traintracks over living out another bitter winter when he exists his final station. He hadn't felt as much as a bump, not screeching wheels, nothing. It's unbecoming, he feels he somehow should've known.

Gloom follows him.

He sees his hundredth frozen man in the street that day.

He wants to go home.

"You want to go home," a gypsy tells him, and Atem just bundles into his furs and holds onto his wallet. "But you want dragon more, no?"

Of course Atem wants a fucking dragon, else he would've turned the fuck around and went home the minute this white bullshit started falling right out of the sky.

North had to have some truly fucked up gods to even come up with this.

The gypsy just laughs at him.

"You're here for a dragon too, piss off," Atem tells her. "Everyone in this god-forsaken pilgrimage wants something."

"The Witcher," she tells him, her caravan is here to bribe the Witcher for a warmer winter.

And it's fair: Witcher to the left, dragons to the right. Fountain of Youth straight ahead, frozen solid and suspiciously yellow.

"Come on, small prince," she coos, and Atem makes his first mistake in not denying it, "I read your fortune. Free."

Hesitantly, Atem slips a mitten off his hand and offers it, but she ushers him into her tent and it's his second mistake.

Maybe she drugs him when she pricks his finger for some spell to 'speak to his destiny in a plate,' or maybe when she pecks his lips because 'he's a cute one.'

He doesn't know it yet, but in a few hours he will wake up _left_ of the Piss Fountain, not right, alone in waist-deep snow, alone for miles with only chests full of stolen gypsy gold to feed him, alone in a middle of a storm so bitter that the skin of his face blisters, alone, alone.

But for now, the gypsy's tent is warm, and heat creeps up Atem's cheeks.

The gypsy takes his hand to tell his fortune and then goes through an assortment of mortified theatrics.

Atem yawns. 

"Do not go back to your home," she spits. "Die here, is for the best!"

"Sure."

She smacks him on the back of the head like he's a boy being smart with her.

"I see misery! You bring home no dragons. Evil follows you home. You bring home evil. Do not come home."

"Maybe it's an evil dragon," he idles.

"The evil follows you and splits alllll," she makes a wide gesture, "of South in two, right down the middle, and cuts your stupid heart "- she snatches nothing from the air- "out of your chest. Die here! Is best."

Atem gives her a measuring glance, cautious of the theatrics and even a little impressed.

"Agh," she swats at him, "whatever. Come, look in your destiny plate."

The concoction smells like piss, and he begins to think this is a common theme in northern magic. He looks, and the piss is black, and she drips his blood into it.

"Now what?"

"Talk to it. If you lucky, destiny talks back."

"Like a telephone?" Atem asks her, but she doesn't know how a telephone works except there are some in the warmer and richer parts of the North, so he abandons the subject and stares into a plate of black piss and asks it if there's anyone in there.

And the plate of piss whispers back.

Something like, _" have mercy,"_ and maybe she lied and there is a telephone under the table, or someone hiding there-

\--but she knocks the plate over. It shatters against her floor and spills its dubious contents everywhere.

Her theatrics are frighteningly good when she goes silent as a grave for a minute, then throws Atem out of her tent.

And then Atem remembers nothing, just sleep, and bitter cold, and being left to die as part of offerings to the Witcher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you for getting here, and I hope you enjoy your read.**
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> **Please keep feeding me fanarts of my Witcher character design & (my) intro art © ™ ® - it brings me life, and I thank everyone for their love and support of this awful adventure. <3 <3 **


	2. two

It follows him.

It's there, between the trees. There are only dead trees here, and _it._

He runs from it, but the northern sky would mean nothing to him even if he could see it through the snow, and he is lost, so lost, more lost than he was before, and the blizzard wiped the tracks the gypsies left hours ago.

It's getting dark.

He would climb a tree and make shelter of it, but _it follows him._

Not as a silhouette lurking the shadows, or as a clawed branch of deadwood, no. No, it's a stretched and horrid thing, and it hovers, and it drips black soot, and it's got these gleaming violet pinholes for eyes, and Atem has been dredging through waist-deep snow to get away from it for a good hour.

He inhales nails with every breath. He can't feel his feet or face. As far as he knows, hell, he has no face left. 

Fear of it is all he feels.

But it stalks him and watches, just watches, keeps its distance and waits until Atem's useless body gives out. He knows it's inevitable, but it surprises anyway him when the cold overwhelms his limbs. He can run no more. He will claw at the thing when it comes for him, and he will die here.

He yells at himself in his head, wills his body awake.

There is warmth and comfort in sleep. If he sleeps, he won't have to know what happens to him.

It walks to him through Atem's own trench line.

Tattered cloth and furs and feathers are all it wears, black and shapeless in the approaching night. Its pinhole eyes are just holes in a mask, and vile magic pours through them.

It speaks to him in a hushed whisper.

"Come," it says as it passes him, and makes a path in the snow.

And, fuck it, Atem gathers up the strength he doesn't have, and goes on for a little longer.

But not long.

He can't remember much after that.

When consciousness seeps into to him, it whispers to him in light cracks and licks of flames. All he sees is a blur and his eyes sting, but he is sure there is a fireplace.

He can't really move.

His entire body tingles viciously, but he is vaguely aware that he is naked and swaddled in furs, and that's good enough.

He is in a house.

And he has a pretty good idea who lives in it.

"You're the Witcher,"  he says when he can speak, but his voice is all fucked up and his teeth won't stop chattering. He touches his face and mouth to make sure he still has them, and his skin is patchy and nipped by the frost, but he's fine. He pats himself down, and everything seems in place - except his clothes - but those are dying by the fireplace.

He is fine, but probably not for long. He feels the Witcher's stare on the back of his neck.

"Yes," it whispers back after a minute.

Atem pulls the furs closer, but his fingers won't bend. His violent trembling makes doing anything difficult. He breathes heavily.

"My guards are looking for me," he manages, just barely, and he isn't sure the witch understood his broken grumbling until _it_ eases into Atem's peripheral vision like a great hovering beast stitched together out of bird bones and animal hides, with its mask and the violent glow of its eyes.

It seems to only care about the teapot in the fireplace.

Atem burrows into the fur an hides in its dark warmth, trembles, screws his eyes shut in his helplessness, and waits.

"Mercy," he whispers to the gods, "please."

The Witcher steps lightly around him, and panic flaps in Atem's chest when his nest is disturbed. But then the footsteps retreat, and he finds a warmed towel draped loosely over his fur.

He snatches it and presses it against his bare skin.

There is also tea, but it could be poison. His hands can't grip around it anyway.

There is a slight echo to the Witcher's whisper, and there is something consoling about it.

"I am going to approach you. _Breathe_."

He can't. He's choking.

It approaches, and he's choking.

It is vile.

The monstrosity that is the Grand Witcher of the North is a heap of patched rat furs with their hollow heads still dangling, and of crow feathers, and tattered scraps of clothes. It's got a mask - of course it does. It's an eerie thing with no features on it, just a circle with magic pouring through the eyeholes. 

Atem remembers faintly when Mahad told him that sometimes the terror was in the costume because the man wearing it was anything but.

But the thought grazes him and goes its own merry way because he's choking - choking on nothing - and the fucking Witcher is trying to sit him against a cabinet. Atem can do nothing but shake.

"My home," the Witcher tells him in a grounding whisper, "is not a place where I hurt princes. Breathe."

And so Atem makes himself stare past the horror, and breathes.

He gets another warm towel for obeying. He stuffs it into the furs and watches creepy hands pour something dubious into his tea.

He drinks it, with a lot of help and without any convincing because he doesn't want _it_ to speak to him.

He drinks it, and it's a sedative, and he spends a good hour just lying on the floor in a pile of furs, calmer than a summer pond.

He thinks.

He is fine.

He is valuable.

It took the witch some effort to revive him, and so he will likely be fine for a while longer.

And, in all honesty, Atem is grateful.

He thinks back to what Mahad told him, about how the best way out of a kidnapping is to form bonds.

"My name," he says quietly, "is Atem."

The Witcher is silent for a while, and Atem wonders if he left.

"Nice to meet you, Atem."

Atem wants to thank him, but he remembers how persistently the stories cautioned about admitting debts to this thing. He remembers laughing, remembers his dragon quest and the gypsies and how this is probably where he will die, and thinks of propriety of all things.

He wants to thank him, but he can't. He wants to run.

"I... like... your fireplace, and your house," he tries, and sounds like a complete asshole.

"You're welcome," the Witcher says.


	3. three

Atem wakes in the morning, or at least he thinks it's the morning. The window shutters are solid wood, and all that lights the Witcher's house are the fireplace and two oil lamps on a crude table.

He is alone.

He spends a few precious minutes checking every nook and cranny of what must be the most cluttered witch hut in existence to make sure he is alone, and when all he finds are dusty books and weird things in jars, he shrugs the furs off, dresses himself in his dry winter gear, and makes a run for it.

When he opens the door, he thinks he's gone blind. Worse, cold slashes at every exposed inch of his skin, and he legitimately thinks he triggered a hex trap.

But it's just the cold, bitter and unforgiving.

His eyes adjust, and the snow is up to his waist now, and there is a trail leading out of the house - but it's peppered over by fresh snow, and it's just snow, everything is snow.

His lips frost over within a minute, but he follows the path until hunger scrapes at the empty walls of his stomach and he thinks he should've stolen some food or perhaps a fucking map, but he didn't see either lying around the hut.

He has a choice, he realizes, to die out here or to go back.

He doesn't get to make his choice, and Atem has a habit of being rash, so perhaps this is for the best. He spots the Witcher about half a mile away, and he is a black dot in a sea of white sky garbage.

If Atem can see the Witcher, then the Witcher can see Atem.

So he hangs his head and walks back, what the fuck else is he supposed to do?

And, he's freezing.

It's so cold and his body is still thrown off by yesterday's happenings, so he can't understand just how cold he is until warmth greets him inside.

He tracked in a lot of snow.

He cleans up after himself, folds his outermost coat, folds the furs that kept him warm the night before.

Catalogs his inventory of weapons (a few kitchen knives, an axe, heavy bottles), pockets a knife.

Sits, waits.

The Witcher comes in heavy with snow, with wind at his back, and it blasts Atem in the face with an icy draft.

The wind has picked up in the half an hour it took the Witcher to get back.

It's snowing harder.

Atem doesn't look his way, just stares at the wall.

"The grand escape," the Witcher tells him in that husky whisper, and Atem jumps out of his skin because it fucking echoes, and also he is so fucking dead for his stunt, why didn't he think it would bring him trouble?

Stupid, stupid!

Atem doesn't say anything, doesn't look at him, just stares straight ahead. At his side, the Witcher shrugs out of a fur coat and adjusts his mask.

He tracked in snow, and blood.

Atem doesn't look, just clutches at his pants and braves some sass.

"Which way is South?"

"Southward," the witch tells him, comes his way, and places two rabbits into a nearby bucket.

He is careful with their bodies, but blood soaks into their white furs anyway. They are small, skinny, and there is barely any flesh around their bones.

Atem stares at them, now.

"Do you know how to skin them?"

He went on many pleasure hunts with his father, of course he does. 

"Do it outside. Don't be wasteful, come for lunch when you're done."

It crosses his mind to take the rabbits and run, but that's no better than the shit plan he had before, so he shrugs into his sheepskin coat and goes to do bitter work in the bitter cold.

He tries in his mittens, but blood sloshes between the threads right away. He sees why, one of the rabbits has slit its throat on a trap, maybe a wire or something. Atem skins his gloves and then skins the damned thing, rips its hide right off, then saws at the cords in its neck - but the variable won't give. He almost nicks himself, but it finally crunches - and _voila_ , one skinned rabbit.

He rubs the hide in the snow, thinks maybe that will clean it, but this only smears the blood more, so he gives up and guts the eyes and the innards and hangs the carcass on the bucket rim to let it drain.

His joints are frozen by the time he gets to the second one, and the cold is so bitter that he can practically taste its bite through his skin.

Washing his hands in the snow proves to be one the worst ideas he's ever had.

"Stupid," the witch whispers softly after Atem leaves the bucket dead in the middle of the space between them. "Go warm your hands."

He smells the soapy texture of fish stew as he approaches the fireplace, and his stomach rumbles in approval.

There are two small bowls set.

 Atem dares a brave "may  I?" while the Witcher inspects what little rabbit meat Atem managed to salvage.

He fills his bowl, thinks, then fills the second bowl and leaves it out, takes his own and goes to sit by the cabinet where he spent the night.

His stew is bland and there are more onions and carrots in it that there is actual fish. He would think the fish settled on the bottom if he wasn't the one to pour it out. He's still hungry when he finishes, but he refuses to ask for seconds, not when the Witcher is eating with his back to Atem with his mask off.

He splits whatever's left between them, later, and that's their meager lunch.

 The silence is ticker than the blizzard outside. Atem knows it's thick because it's howling.

 "They bring gold every year," says the witch suddenly.

His voice is a constant whisper, a single note, and it echoes and entices like a siren call. Atem never traveled West so he doesn't quite know what siren calls are like, but he is sure this is it. It's unsettling, very creepy, and calm.

Atem's breath hitches and his eyes seek out anything to stare at.

"What, the gypsies?" he says to the floor. "Yeah. They're petitioning you."

"Every year. They never get it right."

Atem thinks about it.

"That was a lot of gold back there. The want-"

"I know what they want. They made no contract, and none of it is theirs to give," he pauses. "Shame. They brought enough, for once."

The Witcher's whispering nonchalance is lulling, and Atem has to shake comfort out of his head because it's cradling him and making him complacent.

"Because of me," he says. "But I'm not... theirs? No contract. Great. So I can leave."

The Witcher makes an airy sound then, like a snort or a giggle, and cracks the rabbit bones for marrow.  

The wind outside howls.

"When the storm is over, of course," Atem adds, indignant.

The Wither laughs then, and it's as gentle as lily pollen on his fingertips. Atem knows this laugh. It's the laugh from the taverns and trains and trade routes, one reserved for stupid southern princes who think ice cubes grow form the trees.

How long, tomorrow? Days?

He doesn't want to ask - doesn't want to spend another night here.

He knows the Witcher is kind to him only because he wants a deal out of him.

It doesn't mean Atem is ungrateful.

Which doesn't mean he can stand to look at the thing.

And, also, he is sitting by the fire, but he feels the cold seep into the folds of his sweater. He would wear his coat, but it's still drying, so he goes for the furs and notices that there is only one fur quilt in this whole hut.

Hell, there is one of everything. Atem is left with a sinking feeling he is using things the witch can't really afford to share.

He shrugs it off.

"It will get much colder."

Atem realizes he took to filching, and says nothing.

"I have chores for you, if you want dinner later."

What a deal.

Atem wants to _leave_ , but he can't have what he wants. Instead, he gets a stack of small animal pelts and a needle.

This is stupid.

He feels he should be locked in a cage.

Everything about this feels inappropriate.

But, what the hell. He sorts through them, and they are mostly rats and squirrels, and the Witcher has a habit of leaving the heads on.

He is a scrapper. Atem can tell by the careful way he handles his worn belongings. He doesn't want to offend, so he cuts very usable inch and stitches it into what is shaping to be a jagged four-foot square of shitty patchwork.

He manages to get about a tenth of it done, and it's nightfall, and there's bone marrow stew for dinner.

"No offense," Atem says, "but shouldn't you be rich?"

"You will understand," says the Witcher.

Atem finds witch hands fascinating after he gets brave enough to stare. They are just hands, after all, a good distance away from Atem because _hell no_ he's not going near that thing, but they are hands just like any hands are hands, except the Witcher wears gloves indoors.

The gloves have five fingers, which is promising.

He might be human.

"What's your name?"

 The Witcher sets down his bowl.

"I'll tell you for a small price," he says softly, and Atem realizes this sets the tone for their entire acquaintance. "What will you offer?"

"I don't really have anything," Atem scoffs. He was just trying to be friendly. "Never mind."

"Let me know when you think of something."


	4. four

The storm persists throughout the next day, and it's severe enough to stop Atem from trying his luck.

His needlework is shit.

He's still doing that.

But he figures it doesn't matter because the fur quilt that's essentially his bed is not much better. For all he knows, he's sewing his own coffin. Though that would be wasteful, and if the Witcher doesn't eat his flesh, he would just magic a coffin for him.

And, hell, there must be a spell for better stitching, one that wouldn't cost him a million painful needle pricks.

He has yet to see any actual witchery, supposedly so despicable and decrepit that Mahad would only hint at the terrible things it required.  There was a pair of baby feet in one of the Witcher's jars, and blood in a dozen others.

Atem doesn't want to see his sorcery much like he doesn't want to see the contents of his terrible costume.

But surely, little things.

There are maybe fifteen feet between them, and though Atem doesn't directly look his way, he knows the witch is knitting.

Mana made a long noodle knit itself once.

Atem sighs - very quietly - and itches to drum his fingers against the floorboards. He had to restrain his jittery leg twice already. He jumps at every howl of the wind and every creak of the ancient wood in the walls.

The Witcher turns his way sometimes, and Atem presses himself against the wall and acts unremarkable and unassuming.

He wants to run.

His mind keeps wandering to the door, and each time the witch looks away Atem thinks about making a run for it.

He wants to drum his fingers.

He wants to scream.

Instead, he searches his pockets for loose change the gypsies never cleared out, pulls out a quarter and threads it between his fingers.

But money must have a scent.

He jolts in his seat when he feels eyes on him. He freezes, stops breathing, knows at once what he did to offend. Quietly, ever so quietly, he brings the quarter to a stop.

He's helpless as he watches its fall when it slips through his fingers.

Time loses its meaning, and the quarter drops an eternity later like pistol shot.

He snatches it quickly and pulls up his knees.

"Show me."

"It's just a quarter," he extends his open palm. He wants to say the Witcher can have it, but that would mean proximity.

"Your trick."

Oh.

Gingerly, Atem rolls the coin between his knuckles and tries not to imagine what would happen if he fucks it up.

The Witcher sets aside his knitting and slithers Atem's way.

Atem's skin crawls.

"Do you know more?"

Atem nods. His eyes are dry, and he reminds himself to blink.

"Show me one more."

His party tricks are for fun, for drunk girls who would laugh at anything - and for sweethearts who would tell him exactly where the coin went and then show him up with a better trick, one Atem knows already but would laugh anyway because he likes anyone with quick hands.

He gulps.

His hands are shaking now, far worse than the mild tremble that lost him the coin.

But he says nothing, stares at the quarter and not an inch past it to where the Witcher stands over him.

"Coin's in my hand," he recites his script, and prays the witch is staring at the coin and not at his shaking hand.

He places it between his fingers - but actually over his thumb - wiggles it to show that it's still there, then passes it between his hands and vanishes it.

For a brief moment, his trick is a success.

Storm's howl accompanies the quarter's merciless fall from his sleeve.

He stares at it.

He remembers to blink.

"Another one," he begs. "Let me try again."

 _Please,_ he doesn't say.

He snatches it. His vision is blurring, so he goes by touch, pretends to put it away, then quickly appears it in his palm.

Puts it on the floor, hangs his head, awaits the verdict.

"It's enough," the Witcher tells him in that cooing whisper of his, and Atem thinks he said _'that's enough'_ and shivers.

"You can have it," he slides the coin away from himself.

"No, I already agreed it was enough," he sounds sour that he missed a bargain. "I'll hold up my end. My name is, mm. Yugi."

The name is foreign to both of them, and Atem remembers for a second that the Witcher lies.

"Is it?" he says, and he's just so _stupid_.

"Yes. It's Yugi."

Atem dares a quick glance his way, and yup, friendly witch Yugi is still a hovering monstrosity.

He means to be hospitable, Atem knows.

If he thinks wearing _that_ is more hospitable than appearing as he truly is, _well_.

Atem doesn't know what to say.

He feels sick.

"Nice to meet you."

"Likewise. Welcome to my home."

"Right. Why did you-" _save me_ , Atem wants to say, but blood freezes in his veins because beneath the Wither's crude leather gloves there are skinny hands, and they are blacker than soot, and they land over Atem's mouth, and the pinholes are eerie and blinding, and the mask has hairline fractures in the wood, and this fucking thing literally came out of nowhere, and everything about this is absolutely terrifying, and Atem pretty much shrieks.

"Stupid," the witch hisses at him and throws him aside so Atem can shriek it out and then clutch at his heaving chest to catch his fleeing soul.

[[STUPID]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145494657975/fanart-for-witcher-by-tunafax-its-so-spooky-and) (click)

"S-shit," he says after a minute, and the residue that still jitters in his legs would run him for miles. But there is nowhere to run, so he goes to cower in the corner and makes no eye contact. 

And then there is a dull clack of porcelain against wood, and a steaming mug of hot tea appears on the floor next to him.

Atem looks its way, and catches a glimpse of withdrawing hands that set it there.

They are blacker than crude oil.

Consciously, the Witcher hides them.  

"Stupid," he hushes, and Atem realizes he's got tears welling up in his eyes. He wipes them into his sleeve.

It looks like the thing from nightmares, and now Atem knows that it sure as hell can act it. But what will it do to him that's worse than just looking at it up close? Terrible things, painful things, Atem supposes, bloody and unspeakable things. But he knew that anyway, and it sat at the very edge of his mind, just waiting for something to tip it.

The Witcher watches him.

The Witcher probably knows what he's thinking.

"I never have visitors," he offers, and his whisper is spun silk all over again. "I let you stay by my fireplace that you so _'enjoy,'_ and you keep me company as payment until the weather permits your leave. Do we have an understanding?"

He means more than he's saying, the same way Atem couldn't properly express his gratitude without indebting himself.

He thinks back to every stupid thing he ever said between these four walls, every word, and searches desperately for the precise instance he gave his soul away.

The witch (Yugi, apparently) sighs, produces a bottle from his sleeve and drips in into Atem's tea.

"You're going to give yourself a heart attack. It's Valerian root, calm down."

"That's it?"

"I have chamomile in an outpost. I will bring it when the storm calms."

"I'm _leaving_ ," Atem wraps his trembling fingers around the mug, "when the storm calms. You said I can go."

"I'd laugh at you," the witch informs him. "For your quarter, I'll show you a map."

He holds out his black hand, palm up, and all Atem can think about are the _stories_.

"A map of where we actually are," he says, and he's stupid for saying it - stupid for agreeing to any sort of deal - but his quarter is worthless here. "Relevant and helpful. And I get to look at it whenever."

"As long as you're in the house," the witch provisions.

Atem drops his quarter into a leathery palm, wonders about its texture, waits.

Yugi-the-Witcher pockets it, goes to rummage through his organized mess, returns with a proper map.

The last town and the gypsy outpost are clearly marked, and Atem knows he's not being tricked. But there are roads Atem had never seen, trails and bridges, territories charted further up north than goddamn Fountain of Youth.

 "This," the Witcher points, "is where you are."

...oh.


	5. five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHAPTER WARNING: a bit of body horror, kinda gross.

It's an eerie night in the Witcher's hut when Atem first sees it - his magic.

The fury outside batters at the door with an inconsolable temper, and the hut creaks helplessly under the blizzard's heavy hand.

In the fireplace, coals simmer.

The flame is half what it was, and the frost that crept through the cracks in the absence of heat gets intolerable by the time Atem finally dares to approach the bedding where the Witcher sleeps, just to feed sticks to the flame.

The witch sleeps under a pile of rags and coats and blankets, buried with his head and probably mask-less. There is a heap of hair on the floor, detached, and Atem assumes it's a part of the costume.

He fixes the fire quickly and rushes back to his corner.

But he can't sleep, not here, not like this.

His eyes feel baggy, and his eyelids stick.

But he sees things in the shadows, long and ghastly, watching him through the cracked door of a closet and from darkest spot on the roof.

It is then that the Witcher rises.

His silhouette is a sickly, skinny shape among many dark shapes of the hut. He is quick to dress - quick to pick his mask off the floor, and magic pours through the eyeholes when he sets it.

He gets a little food from the trapdoor in the floor, leaves it out, glances Atem's way, and vanishes.

His departure is so sudden an silent that Atem blinks a few times and searches for his hideous silhouette in the shadows.

When Atem realizes he is alone, he is alone with the shapes in the dark and the monsters in the closet.

He screams.

In the aftermath of what follows, Atem is very embarrassed and has a flaming chair to address. He burns two towels trying to put it out, then burns his hands and chucks the fire into the snow.

There, on the floor where the Witcher last stood, is a dead boy.

Atem steps over it and ignores it, and lights every candle and lantern he can find until there is enough light and he can _breathe_ and be sure that whatever wicked thing comes for him, he will see it.

Only then does he address the child. 

His neck is obviously broken, and his body is warm.

There is a tell-tale smudge of lipstick on his forehead.

Atem doesn't remember feeling as angry as he does when he rips one of the rags right off the Wither's bedding and wraps the little body in it.

He cradles the boy in his arms, doesn't know what to do, decides to give him a funeral in the snow - but the Witcher appears silently and stomps to Atem.

Atem holds the boy and stares dead ahead at the vile thing, into the vapid holes in its mask, and spits at him.

"Give him to me."

"No! Go fuck yourself."

"I did not do this. Give him, without a fight. Give."

He is distracted as he talks to Atem, looks down into his arms and reaches for the child with his ugly black hands.

Atem takes a step back and shouts.

"You can fuck right off, you inbred bastard! What the hell is wrong with you?! Don't-! Don't you fucking touch me-!"

There is a witch hand over his mouth, and Atem has to drop the boy to fight him-

"Shut up," says the Witcher and never once changes the tone of his whisper. "His soul is trying to depart."

His other hand is on the boy's forehead, and he's tender when he brushes bangs out of sleeping eyes.

"Hush," he says, "go, don't linger. Tsk. Hold him for a minute."

The Witcher has a knife - of course he does. It's gold and engraved with a winged handle, embroidered, shimmering.

Atem backs up more.

"You wanted to hold him, so hold him. And," he motions with his knife, "don't you grab this. If it has magic, don't touch it. It's all hexed. Hold the boy."

He touches the boy with the flat of his no-touch knife, and makes a severing gesture into the air.

"Go."

Nothing happens, nothing that Atem can see.

"You're vile," he spits, "to accept this! What, did you give her your name, too?"

"It's a cost of summons, not her deal. I didn't ask for this, she chose to pay this way. Give me the body."

The child is no longer a boy to him, just a body.

Atem sees red, but the Witcher reaches for him so carefully that his anger chips around the edges and lets the fear seep back in through the cracks. 

He's not sure about this anymore.

Not sure about anything.

"If you give it without a fight, I'll show you," the whisper becomes a hiss, "the mother's deal."

Atem doesn't want to deal, but he is ready to give the boy back.

So he does, doesn't think it would qualify - but it does - and the moment the Witcher has the boy secured he-

He touches his knife to Atem's bare hand, and kills him.

Atem drops dead.

He watches his body drop and appreciates how much agony is involved in taking a breath, how painful it is to live. It hits the ground, and the sound it makes are colors, swirls and shapes, and he is the world, and the world is a singular sound to him, and there is nothing to know so he knows everything, and all he feels is his father's grief.

"You're not dead," the Witcher informs him, and on the floor, Atem's body breathes.

And then there isn't a floor, or his body, or the witch hut.

Instead, there is a divan, and the woman in it jolts and shudders when the Witcher appears before her.

There is chalk on the floor - a spell - and an older girl sleeps in her lap. She has braids, the prettiest dress, and a broken neck.

"Where is it?" she panics and scans her living room. "Did you bring--?"

She spots her son's body in the Witcher's arms.

"Why?" she cries. "Don't guilt me for this, I loved them more than anything! I'll have more children - and they'll grow up in the comfort they deserved from the start! It's better! Take him back, and take Jennifer! I paid! Give me," she shrieks, "give me _OUR DEAL_!"

"I brought it," the Witcher whispers, and he's calm. "Hold your son, and I'll give it to you."

The woman looks right through Atem and still doesn't find what she's looking for, but she accepts the small boy and tucks him under her arm.

She doesn't notice the first gold coin slice through  her son's eyes and split his eyelids at the seams.

She notices the one that rips through her daughter's nostril, the ones that hatch through the youthful skin of her face.    

And then Atem is on the floor of the witch hut, breathing hard and screaming.

Yugi brings him tea.

Adds valerian root generously.

Drapes the fur quilt around him.

Touches his back - and when he sees that Atem is still preoccupied with his fit - pets him awkwardly.

"You are depraved," Atem mutters and rocks lightly. "Let me go home. "

"Then you must pay, if you want me to take you. Otherwise, wait for spirng."

Atem realizes there is hand on his back and flinches.

The Witcher backs away.

"You _like_ me!" Atem spits. "You fucking like me, because you gave me a spot on your floor, I don't have... money coming out of... I'm not... you could just do me a fucking favour and take me home, fuck!"

"I don't owe you a favor. I can't."

"You just did... _that,_ you can do whatever the fuck you want! You _want_ to keep me here, you disgrace to magic! "

"I can't," the witch turns away from him and begins preparing their watered down breakfast. "She got what she paid for. You should shut up now, before you say something stupid and I take your deal. Your guards have been trying to summon me for days."

 "My father," Atem hisses, "is looking for me by now. He'll come."

The storm outside howls.

"You should hope he doesn't."


	6. six

"Your hands are like that," Atem tells him because he just stabbed his finger with the needle again, "because you got blood on your evil fucking hands."

The Witcher considers this.

"Yes," he says.

He hides them when he thinks Atem won't notice.

"You must be really ugly. Is it true what they say, that you're so old that the nameless god gave you his magic?"

"Is it true," the Witcher's whisper has a bite, "that the prince of the South couldn't find a princess to bang, so he went North to buy a fresh dragon from the poachers to bribe her father?"

Atem feels brave.

"Yes," he sets his jaw. "Her name is Anzu. She's my beloved friend."

"And what," the witch sounds bored already, "a coward's dragon would buy her hand?"

"We're engaged, you asshole. I'd merry her, but she'd rather not. The dragon is so that her father fucks off."

The witch considers.

"That's one discount princess," he says.

"Half the price. She went off to get a phoenix feather."

"A beast she actually has to fight."

"We both wanted the phoenix," Atem tells him, and he's not exactly sure why he's sharing. "She kicked my ass an went after it herself."

From his seat very far away from Atem, the Witcher laughs, and so Atem backtracks the conversation to where he wanted him to die horribly. He is too hungry and too cold for this tense domesticity.

"So how ugly?"

"Hmm. I've never been called particularly ugly. I would say-"

But then the Witcher moves, and instinctively, Atem cowers.

He is but a small prince, a forgettable thing on the Witcher's floor.

Atem thinks he's finally coming for him, but the weather is more important.

"The storm is easing. Get dressed. Quickly!"

He somehow manages to find a backpack in his organized mess while Atem dresses, packs socks and gloves into it, matches, an ice pick and a net.

"Go get the sled ready. It's behind the privy."

He's packing what would be their lunch eggs into the bag, even splurges and brings a few strips of jerky.  

There is dread in the hut, dread all around, and dread seeps through Atem's newly found bravery born out of nothing but sheer disgust. He's getting kicked out, he thinks. Throws desperate glances around the hut, and his eyes land on his leased map. He tries to burn it into his memory. Stupid. He should've done it earlier, he should've kept his disgust to himself and stayed the fuck out of sight. 

Kicked out, right. The Witcher is taking him outside to keep blood off his floors, and then skin him like he made Atem skin those rabbits, except he'll keep Atem alive and make him return to his place on the floor, and Atem wants to crawl out of his skin himself because there are ants just between his skin and the fatty layer under it, and his hair stands- 

And he stands, but he can't-

"I know you heard me."

"...where are you taking me?" Atem whispers, just barely. 

Yugi catches onto his terror. 

Latches onto it, and it doesn't matter if what he says is a lie or not. 

He is the Witcher of the North, and all Atem is - here in the Witcher's hut - is a screamer.  

"To check the fish traps. Grab firewood whenever you see any. "

Outside, the frost makes up where the wind is lacking by punishing Atem's stupid mouth.

"How far-?" he manages, and it's like inhaling a mouthful of barbs.

He has the sense to wrap a scarf around his face.

"Four hours until nightfall, we have to be back by then. Never go outside in the dark."

It was just one time, and Atem really needed to piss, and he has a heart condition to prove that he will never try again.

They make trenches in the snow with their bulky coats, drag the sled behind them. It's almost a crime to disturb something so finely sprinkled with powdered sugar, so deceptively fluffy and smooth. They ruin the landscape between rare trees, and Yugi doesn't let a single fallen branch go uncollected.

Yugi.

It's an unfit name for a vile thing.

Atem wishes he never asked - but he wonders if trying for at least some sort of familiarity with this _creature_ was a thing that saved his life.

This, he supposes as he struggles hungrily through a swamp of frozen barbs, is a kind of life, anyway.

He doesn't understand why things have to be this way.

If Atem suffers this, the Witcher must suffer it too, since he's right in Atem's tracks. 

When they come to a clearing, the snow is so smooth,  and the wind is so still, and the world is so silent, that Atem can't help but let the clutches of dread and uncertainty release him just enough for him to pretend the snow dunes are sand dunes. For the briefest of moments, Atem is home. 

When the Witcher stops by a landmark pole for what he assumes is a break, Atem just quits everything and kind of runs (stumbles) through thigh-deep snow to the very middle of the perfect clearing  just to corrupt its flawless surface. 

If Yugi thinks this is Atem's daring escape, he doesn't seem to care, just minds his witchy business by the pole.

Maybe he's eating lunch.

Atem tracks back, and sees that he's digging.

"I'll have you know," he tells Atem and recruits him into his snowcastle endeavour, "this lake is a hundred feet deep."

"What lake?" Atem says, looks around, and then: "...fuck."

They dig until they hit ice, and then the witch ushers Atem to get off the 'lake' and go stand on the 'pier' if he insists on staying off the 'beach.'

There are literally none of these things here.

There is just snow.

So Atem backs up a foot, and the witch hammers the ice with his little ice pick. It's a laborious task, and the ice is deep - deeper than Atem imagined, but there was a hole here before and only the very bottom of it froze.

The ice pick cuts the dead silence of the clearing better than it cuts the ice.

What a tedious way to live.

The trap is stuck, the witch tells him.

Sighs.

Unbuttons his overcoat, slips an arm out.

"You're crazy," Atem tells him.

Rolls up his sleeve - and Atem in habit of never looking directly at him, but this time, he stares. Above his charcoal hand, around the elbow, his skin is pale. It's a regular color for northerners, Atem reminds himself, but he doesn't expect to see it on the Witcher.

He expects scales and spikes.

And then in goes the hand, into the icy water.

Yugi makes a noise, rummages around, pulls out his trap.

There are two fish in it, and they flap until he clubs them against the ice.

The next trap goes without a hitch.

By the time they make their way around the lake, the wind picks up and flutters their coats lazily.

It starts to snow.

They've been at it for about three hours and there's one trap left, according to the witch, and Atem finally believes he will get to keep his skin for another day after all. 

They should be back with time to spare.  But Yugi still thinks about forgoing the last trap, and Atem feels brave enough to supply his (stupid) southern opinion.

"We're losing daylight," Yugi says. "But, fine."

He retrieves a single small fish from the trap, and they hurry back.

The sled is heavy, and Atem doesn't quite notice the burden on his eyes as it overcomes him gradually. And then it's complete whiteout. He can't see a thing, and worse, he can't hear anything except the moody wail of the storm. 

The windshear faces them.

In the North, you don't quite notice you're a dead man walking until you are. It isn't difficult to move into the headwind until it is impossible, and every step is a marathon. Atem faced this once before, the day evil himself took him in and thawed him, but facing it a second time makes him none the wiser. 

Yugi holds his stupid hand and keeps him in his sight.

"Just magic us back!" Atem shouts over the wind.

If Yugi has eyes, he surely rolls them, and turns them back to the lake.

"What the fuck!" Atem yells. "I can't hear you, where the fuck are we going?"

Night sneaks up on them just as the storm did.

Atem clings and _clings_ to the offered hand. Refuses to be left behind, refuses to let the Witcher revoke his hospitality.

And then he stumbles into a steep hill - and Yugi tells him to dig into the snow - and it's a door.

It's black inside, and freezing, and Atem had never appreciated any place more.

He checks to make sure he still has a face.

His hands lost feeling so he can't quite tell, and his only indication that this place isn't a hypothermic hallucination are two pinhole lights in the eye sockets of the Witcher's mask.  

And then, the Witcher sparks a match, finds an oil lamp with its tiny flame, and lights it.

The shed is seven feet by seven feet of glorious storm shelter.

It's packed with shovels and animal snares, furs in much worse shape than the ones back in the hut, a firepit in the floor and a loft four feet off the ground.

The Witcher is so close to him now, and Atem tries to shrink away because dark is unkind to his inhospitable costume. But there is very little room to shrink. They bump elbows more than once, and each time Atem's heart stops and he shudders for reasons far more punishing than the cold.

He ducks under the loft finally, but there is no room for him here just as there was no room for him in Yugi's house, but he took him in anyway. 

He thinks on this while the witch spends a great deal of time making a fire. He gives Atem a share of jerky and a merciful breadth of space, but it's a temporary respite. 

Atem eyes the loft that's no wider than four feet and piled with bedding.

Feels that the draft on the ground is unbearable.

Knows where this is going.  

Shivers, and humbly bows his head. 

"Was I right about you hands?"

"You were."

"Keep them," Atem says and tries to sound firm, "to yourself, please."

"Likewise."

His cheeks burn.

"I.... like... your shed," he says, and means ' _thank you again, for the shelter.'_  

"You're welcome."


	7. unlucky seven

The witch - Yugi - breathes steadily and curls up when he sleeps.

Atem can't quite tell if he's asleep or just lying and staring at nothing just like Atem is lying and staring at nothing, but he knows the witch sleeps with his head submerged and likes to hog blankets.

The wall of the shed is damp after thawing, and Atem spent the night pressed into it with his knees and forehead, cowering from the thing behind him. He dared one quick peak, in the dead of the night, just one.

Between them, he found a full foot of space.

The witch - Yugi - managed to balance himself on the very edge of the loft and sleep burrowed under furs.

Atem doesn't need to check. He is sure that the witch is facing away from him and respects what precious distance permits them to sleep in their own corners.

But that doesn't spare them from the damp cold and the misery it brings.

Beneath them, the fire crackles and warms, but also thaws icy wood form the inside and makes breathing uncomfortable.

Atem woke up because he couldn't feel his arms, and found his coat was the culprit.

Nobody should have to sleep in their outerwear.

Nobody should sleep like this.

Behind him, the Wither stirs, woken by the sudden absence of wails outside.

The shed stopped creaking.

The storm passed, and through the gaps in the roof boards Atem sees that it's morning.

"Well," he hears, and it's almost a real voice. Yugi seems to realize this the second Atem does, and then there is shuffling. "This was unpleasant."

He sleeps with his magic mask off.

Good to know. Useless. Kind of foul.

"The floor of your house is lovely, did you know? I love it there," Atem says.

So they dig the sled out and get the fuck out of there.

They cross the lake, and there are tracks there. Fresh tracks.

Days of fatigue shoot right out of Atem. He's awake, alert - even the tips of his ears perk up.

He sucks in as much frosty air as his lungs would take.

"HEL-!!!"

The Witcher shoves him, tackles him into the snow, and Atem freezes up when he should be fighting.

He can't. He just can't.

Instead, he tries to crawl away, but the witch straddles him and clamps his mouth shut.

"People don't come here," he hisses, "to help anyone, except themselves."

Snow gets into every gap that separates his coat and his skin. It burns his neck, blisters everywhere it touches, and Atem still tries to scream and toss.

Every time he looks where he's aiming, the Witcher's there. Every glace into his horrible mask snuffs a bit of fight out of Atem, until there's nothing left.

He stops flailing and lets his limbs drop at his sides. 

"If they want to help you, you can leave with them," the Witcher hisses right into his face, and Atem screws his eyes shut and imagines he's anywhere but here. "They won't. Get up, let's go."

He does as he's told, doesn't bother dusting the snow off, just drags the sled and doesn't look up.

They follow the tracks, and perhaps the most merciless thing about snow is that it makes hiding impossible.

Not that the disheveled man limping towards them is hiding.

They probably don't look much better, but hell, it means the man made it all the way out here in the fucking storm.

The Witcher lies, it's all a lie.

Atem quits being a coward, and runs.

Doesn't look back, screams for help.

It's not a man - it's a woman, and she roars when she sees him.

"We paid for it!" she screams, and Atem recognizes her as one of the gypsy women. "We gave you so much, you cheating son of a bitch!"

Behind them, the Witcher stands. He is unmovable and unmoved. He is a stark pillar against white backdrop, and the trees behind him are clawed black hands.

He is a nightmare in daylight.

"Never mind that!" Atem yells at her. "He lies and he cheats, let's just go back!"

"The prince?!" she shrieks, inconsolable, then throws her head to the sky and laughs. "You accepted! You took him, and you never paid for him!"

"Go to your caravan. Forget about this-"

She laughs again.

"They all froze out there, you dumb southern boy! He killed us! He killed us all with his storms, when we paid him to make it better!"

When the Witcher speaks, it's a whisper, so close they can feel his breath in their ears.

But he still stands far, and where there was silky kindness in his voice, there is now menace.

Atem's skin crawls.

"You made no contract. None of it was yours to give."

"Then what do you call this?!" she drags Atem to her. He shoves her away, but stands close.

"A guest. Now leave, or is there something you want?"

She's gone wild, and so she laughs.

"I want my family that you let die, all of them! I want spring!"

"You cannot afford it. Leave."

"HA! Where? Just walk back?! I'm as good as dead, and you know it!"

The Witcher is silent for a moment. He lets her wail and scream, swat at Atem an stomp out her miserable tantrum.

"I can return you to a town," he says finally. "For a price."

She stops.

Anyone would stop for a lifeline.

"What price? I got nothing left," she says, quieter, more to herself.

"Your life is worthless," the Witcher agrees, his whisper icy.

She thinks about it, and Atem is a bystander to a scene that scrapes at his soul. He wants to go with her, wants her to take him, wants to leave her to die and go in her stead. But she shouldn't deal. Nothing is worth it with the Witcher. What can she offer for one trip? Her limbs, her future children?

"If you take me to the city," she says finally, "I'll fuck you."

Atem shouldn't splutter, but he does, and he's worried it's vomit.

He doesn't want to hear this. Doesn't want to know.

"Fair enough," the Witcher says, and his whisper is cruel. "We have a deal."

She is silent for a good minute, doesn't know what to do with herself.

Laughs.

"You murdered everyone I ever loved," she cackles, "and shit, I'll still fuck you, you piece of shit."

Yugi doesn't move, and so she starts for him.

Two steps forward, and she stops.

"A guest, huh?" she says in the softest of venoms. "We were going to send twenty girls, but then you showed up. They would be guests. They would be guests!"

She has a knife; of-fucking-course she has a knife, everyone except Atem has a knife, and she comes at him with disciplined precision.

Atem ducks, but moving is difficult in winter gear, and he can't find his footing in the snow.

And she's good, she's very good, and Atem is a bulky mess, and he ducks out of her way until he makes enough distance to shrug out of his overcoat and throw it at her.

Vengeful fighters are erratic, and, had Atem caught her on a better day, he'd be dead.

But she is disoriented by the coat, and without it, Atem is faster, greasier. He slips between her wild swings and jabs his elbow into her ribs.

It knocks the knife out of her hand, but she knocks the breath out of him, then squeezes her hands around his throat and screams, screams as Atem rips out her hair and kicks her in the groin.

He's losing air, but her mittens are loose and he has a lot to work with. He pulls his fists back and knocks out her front teeth.

Her grip fails, and he shoves her into the snow. Kicks her in the stomach. Spits her way.

Stands there, panting, remembering who he is and why this is happening to him.

"I'm going back to the house," he yells. "Do her in the snow for all I fucking care, don't bring her inside."

And then-

He doesn't quite feel any pain, exactly, but his leg gives out under him and he falls.

He doesn't understand, but the bitch has her knife back, and she's crawling towards him, and there's blood in the snow.

She comes at him feral, goes for his throat - but her swing is too high, too frantic, and then she's dead.

Atem grabs her wrist mid-swing, turns it, and she falls onto her own knife.

He lies under her and pants heavily.

The sky is the bluest blue he'd ever seen, and air tastes better than truffles.

He can't get enough of it.

And when the Witcher comes to block his view, his hideous manner doesn't spoil Atem's life one bit. 

He helps Atem roll the bitch off. He checks that she is dead, and then discards her. The wolves will waste nothing, not her body - and not his, if there is no more house around here where he's welcome. 

Atem doesn't know where they stand.

Doesn't want to know, just wants to taste the air for a while longer. 

He doesn't stand.

Instead, he lies in the snow and stares at the sky where the northern gods are laughing at a stupid southern princeling.

But the witch - something is off. Something is off, and Atem will live in the fucking shed and steal his fish and make his way home, and this time, he'll fight. He'll fight anyone.

"Can you stand?"

"What?"

"Your leg. Stand up."

Atem looks, and the snow around his foot is red all over.

It doesn't really hurt like a stab wound should hurt, and he would know. All he feels is shame, and the sudden absence of a life next to him that he ended. It's a dull feeling in his foot, loose and very wrong. He wiggles his toes, feels them moving.

It's broken, he decides. He broke his fucking leg, and even the peppery taste of air can't help him.

But it's fine.

He'll stay in the shed and it'll heal.

This is fine.

This is fine, all he needs is to breathe.

"I'm fine," he says and sports his best poker face.

The Witcher offers him a hand, and Atem decides being pitiful has worked so far, so he takes it and holds back a fit of choking.

Gets up, puts weight on his leg.

It gives under him, and he falls forward.

It barely hurts.

The witch catches him, but Atem shoves at him and drops into the snow.

His trousers are bulky, and the ones under them are clingy, and there is an appropriate amount of blood. He rips his sock out of the way. There, just above his heel, is where he bitch had cut him.

He sees it and screams the most vile profanities he knows, screams them until a bird answers him, until he chokes on air.

She severed his fucking tendon.

He'll never walk on that leg again. 

"No. No, no no. No! No deal, I don't want a deal!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol hes getting a deal


	8. eight

"I don't want a deal," he chants, and the witch steers him into the their house with a promise of warmth and getting his creepy fucking hands off Atem. "I don't want a deal. I don't want a deal. I don't want a deal."

Their house isn't warm.

The fire has long consumed the last log they left for it. There isn't even a simmer left in the coals, not one red spark, and what remains is ashier than the northern faces.

The Witcher sits him down on his own bed and sparks fires. Fire in the fireplace, fire in the oven, fire under the cauldron. Fire in every lantern and every candle, anything that would return warmth to a place where wickedness lives.

Atem hisses as he peels his trousers off. Blood iced over and fused the fabric to his skin, and it's hard to tell where his wound begins just by blood and gore.

He almost regrets using his scarf as a gauze. Soft wool fibres are pins now. But he hadn't bled out. He isn't even dizzy, and he thinks maybe it was the bitter cold that saved him.

But now it bleeds.

Now it nags him.

"Nhhh," he groans as he rinds the wool out of a fold between shin and a white bit of muscle with his bare fingers, and _ffffffuck._ Fuck. "You got any moonshine?"

"I do," says Yugi and instead brings him a pot of cold water. "Drop those towels here. The clean ones."

Atem does, and he stalks away to set his pot over the fire.

"That's so great," Atem snaps, "that you have it."              

"You should know how this works by now."

"God fucking damn it - _fine_. Fine! What do you want?" he winces and ruffles through his pockets, "I got-"

But his pockets are empty, and where there was loose change there is now a hole.

Atem's stomach bottoms out, blood rushes out of his face, humiliation pricks his cheeks.

He had never felt more pathetic than he does now, alone, cold and penniless, at the mercy of a monster who demands a fee for everything, and shit, there goes the air again, there go the walls.

Here comes the Witcher, with his tattered rags and peeled skins and hollow eye sockets.

He brings Atem chamomile tea.

Towels boil.

In his charcoal hand there is a friendly jar. It winks at Atem and awaits payment.  

"Do you have secrets?  Stories?"

The rag Atem stuffed under his foot has bleed all the way to the quilt underneath it. Atem picks at the edge of the gore, where his skin and meat attach, knows the sear he feels will only get worse now that sensation is thawing back into him.

"Blew my cousin," he says, "more than once."

"Dear lord," says Yugi and quickly hands him the moonshine.

Atem takes a generous swig, shudders.

"One more? Stole his baby dragons, dipped them in ink, made it look like they spilled it. Let 'em loose in his rooms. Still doesn't know I did it. Now give me those towels you just happen to be boiling."

Water scolds him, and when he cleans, his fingers go deeper into flesh than fingers should ever go. Every scrub feels like he's hollowing out a cavity in his own fucking foot.

Moonshine scorches him.

He shouts through the whole fucking thing, pants and wheezes, and Yugi just sits next to him and watches, probably enjoys the spectacle.

Atem has no fucking idea, doesn't care.

...hell, he'll have to stitch this, and that he knows he cannot do.

Stupid!

He let this happen, bought it onto himself. He ran, like an idiot, and paid for it.

He shuts his eyes and rests for a moment.

And then there is touch high above his wound, and he thinks it's a spasm - opens his eyes and finds a black pinky stroking his shin lightly.

He shudders, and not because of agony or frost.   

 "I don't want a deal," he says and he's not sure he even convinces himself.

He stares at where the witch is touching him and wonders if he can maybe blow him in exchange for something substantial.

"Look," he mutters and picks up the finger like it's a rotten worm, then sort of flicks it off his leg. "No freebies."

The moonshine made him brave, he thinks.

That, and the room finally begins to spin.

"Then turn around, and I'll pack it for you."

"Why," Atem doesn't like this. "No."

"Then it's best for us if you never offer _that_. Turn, stupid."

He thinks his whole foot falls off, or that it's dangling by thin capillaries and there is no sewing it back. He thinks it twice as he moves, and the sickening feeling of air against bone makes him grind dust between his teeth, but of course it's not a real feeling. He whimpers anyway.

He turns. His feet end up in the Witcher's lap, and Atem has nowhere left to go except stick his head into sand and hiss into the pillow.

He doesn't want to think about this, so what he thinks about is pain instead.

Touch is agony. His legs, his face, everything. But he feels gauze and splints on the right leg, so at least he'll live another day.

His witch has warm hands.

Atem never noticed, until they run up the sole of his healthy foot, grip his ankle and push his toes back. There are pressure points in his arch he never knew he had. Yugi cracks his toes, cups his heel, stretches out his healthy tendon.

It's satisfying and intimate, and despite himself, Atem feels flushed, floating.

Tired.

His pain is distant now.

"Alright, so," he mutters. "You gave me a magical foot rub."

His witch chuckles.

"No."

"Pain-relief witchy... touch?"

"I drugged your tea."

Mh. Of course he did.

Yugi slides his feet off his lap, wraps them in a heated towel and lets Atem settle.  

"If you don't want a deal," he whispers humbly and takes a seat at the foot of the bed, "what do you want?"

He can't just get Atem high to extort deals out of him!

"I could, easily. But you already have a deal, so pick something."

"What," Atem snipes, high and pissed, "now you can magic? What, did I inherit her deal? Do I have to fuck you now, is that it?"

The Witch is, as always, unmovable and unbothered.

"You did me a..." his whisper falters, "a favor. I am..."

He tries for a while, and Atem's thoughts drift so he forgets all about him.

"...grateful."

"Unless you're gonna eat me in the next hour, I really don't care about you right now."

"...do you want me to fix your leg?"

"I don't want a fucking deal! I don't want a deal! I'm not paying you anything!"

"But you already paid. I owe you a favor now," he sighs. 'Fine. If not your leg, what do you want?"

He runs his charcoal hand down Atem's healthy foot, and Atem flinches and moves the fuck out of his reach.

He is tart and roofied, and it takes him a minute to understand what is being said to him.

"You mean you owe me?" he can't help but cackle at the absurdity of it, "after you-" _took me in and-_

Does it even matter?

Atem decides there is only one right thing to say.

"Is it enough to get me to the village?"

"Yes."

"And fix my foot?"

"Or fix your foot. Pick one."

Atem thinks about it.

Purses his lips and balls his fists, knows that the witch once again took to petting his ankle.

"If you fix my leg _and_ take me to the village," he says soberly, "I'll fuck you."

Yugi laughs.

"A release of a prince is worth far more than to be the first man to fuck him," Yugi tells him. Then adds, "or twentieth."

" _Excuse me?_ "

He laughs again, and it's not a whisper - it's a _voice_. It's rusty and wicked in a thrilling sort of way, and since he never spoke to Atem with any measure of malice, it sounds almost neighborly.

He scoots away then and makes just enough room for himself to collapse backward into the bed that's rightfully his, right next to Atem.

Atem shivers, feels ants crawl under his skin.

And then he sees it, a streak of northern ash beneath the mask. A neck, or perhaps a jaw line.

His witch just lays beside him and stares at the roof.

"You give me your name, and trade mine for coin tricks. You won't leave, and you make me like you. Now, this."

Atem's been trying to leave since he got here!

But his protests fall on deaf ears - if the witch even has ears.

"It's been very difficult and demanding," Yugi says, "to host you here. It will only get harder. Winters up here are unkind."

Atem says nothing.

Yugi sighs.

"I asked you for mercy, Atem. You are too cruel."

[[CRUEL]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145548313055/i-drew-more-witcher-fanart-because-tunafax-is) (click)

 


	9. nine

The Witcher's long and dirty hair is not his own, and Atem wonders if anything is real about him.

He sleeps quietly, with his back to Atem and his knees against a wall, curled up and nestled into every blanket he owns, and Atem is an idiot for letting him steal them.

So he scoots as close as he can, and shares the edges.

Yugi radiates heat. His warmth scalds Atem and makes him forget about his pain and appetite for another hour. He drifts in and out of consciousness, dreams of southern flash fires burning up every bit of snow, and them both with it.

It's a nightmare, but there is familiarity and comfort in it. In his dreams, he's ablaze and nothing will ever help him. His fingertips burn first, scorched and blistering. It consumes him - consumes his entire hand -

He wakes up, and he's got a handful of Witcher's shirt in his fist, and did the Witcher notice, _hell_.

"Fuck, sor-" he swears and sits up, "-ry _yy ohoho._ Oh fuck, fuck, ow."

Yugi rummages for his mask before he turns to Atem, and it sits crooked for a while.

He shimmies into a knitted cardigan, drapes a shawl over himself. Climbs out of bed. Scratches his arm. Drags his feet and makes his way to the stove.

He doesn't bother with his coat, doesn't bother with acknowledging Atem's existence, and that could be an ill omen within itself.

But without the coat, Yugi is smaller.

Sickeningly human, almost.

Tired.

Atem feels like he's prying, like this is a private home of a monster and he is an idiot with his face pressed into the keyhole. He shouldn't look - shouldn't breathe Witcher's way - but the corner of his eye betrays him as he checks his wrappings.

Yugi is groggy, and Atem's bandages have bled through.

It's difficult to think about anything except how rotten he feels inside his skin.

That, and pain.

"Hey," he says, "I really didn't mean to grab you. I apologize."

His witch says nothing until he brings him tea.

"What were you dreaming about?"

"Fires."

"Fires?" Yugi asks. "In this cold?"

"You weren't cold," Atem mutters because he is an idiot.

He hides behind his tea, and the witch checks his temperature with his atrocious hand.

He flinches.

"I set out red meat. Fry something for both of us for when I get back, there is a cane behind you. You're still anemic."

"No fever?" Atem dares to be hopeful.

"No. But rinse it with moonshine again. There's nothing here to treat infection."

So the thing is, the Witcher is shaped like a human.

He has the right number of arms and legs, and his proportions seem proportional. There aren't any spikes protruding though the back of his sweaters, and Atem can't spot a tail or horns or wings.

And, he is warm.

He's warmer than a breeze on a summer's day, warmer than honey-lemon tea on a chilly night.

Atem wants to press his hands into him and warm them like he would with a hot mug or a casing for electricity.

He'd even hold his hand.

"Holy shit," he says and stares into his empty mug. "What did you put in this? Don't say opium. Or morphine, or heroin."

"Opium is for smoking."

"Really wouldn't know."

"Ah, meant to ask about the ban on narcotics in the South. My easiest deals. But royalty too, really?"

"It's for our benefit," Atem mutters and nests into the headboard. "Father banned it for everyone else just so we can't get to it. I had an uncle when I was little. No one talks about it, but - I mean - it's pretty obvious what happened if people are dealing for this stuff with _you_."

"Well. Sometimes they deal out of it, it's why I have so much," Yugi sighs. "I'd rather have bread. You're been on morphine since yesterday."

Atem swallows hard and withdraws.

At least he's starting to feel kind of good, though he doubts he really feels anything.

"You were shaking and hissing. It must be very painful. I didn't realize in the night because you refused to be noisy."

"I wasn't," Atem tells his feet, "doing any of that."

"Just do your chores," Yugi pets his healthy leg and gets up. "I'm leaving soon, don't burn my house down."

He can't back up more, and the Witcher is in his line of sight no matter where he looks. In the end, he isn't really sure why he's cowering.

He can look at him now, if he wants to.

He can look into his creepy mask or glare his wicked hands down.

Atem has a favor to collect.

Somehow, this doesn't make him any braver.

"I decided, you know," he says quietly, "what I want. Thought all night about it."

Yugi pauses with his back to him.

"Now is a very bad time for you to make deals."

"No, I think now is good. I know you're stranded here," Atem admits, more to himself than to the witch, and his ego swells a bit knowing that nature is merciful to no one. "Like me. You're snowed in. I don't get why, but you are."

He hangs his head then, and the creature gawks at him like it always does. It says nothing, and Atem doesn't expect it to.

"I'm using up your supplies."

He wants to say he's sorry, that he's grateful for the stubborn hospitality that would've been revoked by now if the Witcher cared about any of the things Atem had called him. He supposes truth would't require retaliation, not by someone ancient enough to make peace with it. 

Heat prick his cheeks despite the cold.

Nothing is worth rationing eggs in half. Not a favor, not a prospect of some lucrative deal a prince of South may or may not offer him.  

He knows it's not worth it - knows that Yugi knows it's not worth it - and it's shameful, all of it.

"You are being kind," he mutters to his bandaged foot, "and I'm a terrible houseguest. I... _like_ your patience, and I'm sorry that I'm going to collect that favor."

He bows to the witch in his seat, humbled by the tattered ends of the fur robe Yugi gave him to keep warm.

The witch looms for a moment, and bows right back.

"Can I ask," he says, "what I even did to earn it? I mean, I didn't raise my hand against a woman and murder her— For, for a favor, I really didn't mean— She, it just happened."

He's floating now, and his words float out of him, and he can't catch the right ones.

"Er," Yugi says. "It's a delicate matter. My comfort isn't worth much, but you spared me a magic deal."

"What the hell," Atem mutters. "If you don't want it, don't take her shit deal, she just wanted to go home."

"It was fair."

"Then it's fair that I get to go home, right? I thought about it. When I ascend to the throne, being a cripple will excuse that I'm a total fucking coward. And, I'll be out of your hair. So it works out, right?"

"I understand," Yugi says, and it's almost soothing. "Go get your coat."

"No! No, didn't you hear me?" he hides his face in his hands, but shame finds him even there. "I'm such a coward," he whispers to himself.

"Your timing is poor."

"I'll change my mind if I take any more time," Atem says and braves it, jerks up and stares right into Yugi's stupid mask.

The Witcher is terrifying and depraved and wicked and  human and _warm_. He was kind to Atem - still is kind - and Atem feels no better than a parasite.  

"Please fix my foot. Yugi."

The witch stares at him and lingers for a good minute as if he's giving Atem the opportunity to change his mind.

"Tsk," he says finally. "We have a deal. And I have a house call. Do your chores."

Atem kneads his palms.

"So," he forces himself to watch Yugi shrug into his cloak. "How angry are you? So I can. You know. Tea and floor and everything."

The Witcher is much bigger in his rat skins, bulkier and all-consuming. His presence demands attention, and evading the watchful glow of his eyes does nothing to undermine his existence. He invades attention, and when Atem looks away, the Witcher invades in his mind.   

But his touch is feathers against Atem's cheek. His hand is ghastly, but he's gentle with it.

Atem leans into it just a tiny bit.

"I'm so glad," Yugi says, "that I won't be here when the morphine kicks in the whole way."

"Huh?"

"You're narrating."

"I..." he decides coal skin is probably just skin, and wonders what else the Witcher has that's black. "What?"

"...goodbye."

No dead children appear in his place this time, and Atem doesn't check what the price of summons was until he trips over it and falls so hard he bites his tongue bloody. He tastes it, but pain and reason aren't something he understands. 

It's a golden thing, bejeweled and familiar, and Atem knows this crown for what it is.

His father's desperation. 

He's leaving. He's leaving with his bandages soaking bloody, he's leaving by foot if the witch doesn't come back and take him home - leaving _now_ \-  so he unbars the door, and falls on his ass.

The North keeps him put.

Pins him flat to the ground, knocks chairs over.

The fireplace flames out and little fires lick walls just barely before they too fall victim to the blizzard Atem invited into their house. 

He tries to clean up after he manages to win a one-footed uphill battle with the door, tries to salvage broken jars and scattered papers and spare himself from the Witcher's wrath, but his numb hands are no use. He makes more mess with his bleeding leg than he can clean, and in the end he just stuffs himself into his corner with his face in his knees.

He falls asleep expecting to awaken without any feet at all, with his guts out.

Instead, he wakes up under a quilt with his hands tied behind his back.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he begs through his parched, sore throat, and even wheezing is painful. "I changed my mind, I want to leave. Please."

The Witcher only ignores him, and cleans his mess.  


	10. ten

What the Witcher boils in his cauldron smells like piss and rot and makes Atem think of unfulfilled promises.

He sits humbly at the foot of Yugi's chair, huddled in furs, with a warm towel over his mangled foot and a cool one on his forehead.

He sweats. He shivers.

The fire curls and crackles, sparks in the lightest shades of purple and smells of pine. Atem watches tiny embers fall into stones just inches away from the wooden floor, and thinks how no one in their right mind would take this kind of risk back home. But his caution is subdued, dulled by the haze of fever.

Pine is not the kind of tree that burns in the South. But if there were pines in the South, they too would burn, along with acres and acres of other trees and every creature that lives in them.

The Witcher would surely have enough rat skulls then.

Atem made the right choice, he thinks, but for the wrong reasons.

He found small chunks of pus deep inside his wound, and the old bandages he had to wash were crusted yellow.

So he asked for more morphine and a knife to attempt an excision, but Yugi told him it wouldn't matter.

Neither the morphine nor medicine can ease the pain of his sorcery.

Atem leans against the chair and watches 'the sorcery' bubble pink.

"Is there any good reason all northern magic smells like a back alley?"

"I've always wondered about the southern thing for shadows."

"Hmm," Atem frowns. "I know this one. Something about fright and trickery. There's also the fire thing."

"Every discipline has a 'fire thing,' even West."

"What do they burn, water?"

"People. They also boil things. Like people. This is a western brew."

Atem frowns. The piss smell is definitely from the North.

"You're not supposed to combine."

"Yes. Do you know why?"

Because the gods of the world can't get along for five fucking minutes, and the noise pisses off the spirits who wake up to feast on human suffering.

The witch laughs and tells him to scoop a bucket of snow from the outside and go sit on the bed. He keeps asking thinks like that of Atem, like he forgets he only has one functional foot. But Atem can't tell him that, so he grabs the cane, grits his teeth and does as the Witcher tells him. He's the Witcher, after all.

When he comes to join Atem, he brings with him his whole cauldron.

"I thought," he says and feels dread punch through the bottom of his stomach, "that I have to drink that."

Yugi, who so far has been nothing but patient with Atem's fears, curls his fingers.

"You never made it to the Fountain," he whispers. "Ah."

His concoction sizzles.

"What, is this from the Fountain?"

"Yes. The Fountain is a hot spring, Atem. Of boiling... let's say oil."

Atem takes one look at the boiling bucket of piss and jumps the fuck away.

"Yes," the Witcher tells him. "You _will_ do it. One last thing."

He pulls out his gold knife, the one that ripped Atem's soul and shot it across the world, and Atem thinks that maybe mercy like that would make this easier.

But the witch only pricks his finger.

"I'm taking three days from your life. No matter how long you have left in this world, your soul will depart three days sooner."

He dips the tip of his knife into the oil, and it changes from piss to violets.

People do this, Atem realizes. They do this to their faces and their bodies, and the smooth sheen of their perfect skin must be one severe burn scar.

"Well," Atem braces himself and briefly considers disobeying. "I better have one splendid foot after this."

"A hot foot," Yugi agrees and Atem snorts despite himself.

 He bites down on a rag.

Holds his breath.

Feels searing heat in the solve of his foot as he hovers it over the pot - and just as he plunges it into unbearable agony, Yugi grabs both of his hands and holds him.

Atem screams.

He's been doing a lot of that lately.

He bruises his throat - probably bruises his witch - and smears the rat coat with mucus and sounds of his pain that will linger in its threads forever.

"Now in the snow, come on," he doesn't hear.

There is only darkness, and phantom agony, and his witch who idly lets him cry.

He's in Yugi's lap when he can think of anything other than searing pain, and he has a black hand clenched mercilessly under his broken fingernails.

Black skin bleeds red.

He lies there and wheezes, and Yugi humors his imaginary pain and waits patiently for Atem to realize he should get the fuck off.

Is it still there? The foot?

He doesn't remember tucking his legs to his chest, but they're both there, and he feels down his shin with caution.

It's there.

Phantom burns echo up his spine when he touches it, but his whole foot is there, oily and healthy and smooth.

"I had a scar. Here, and-

He finds pedicured toenails under his fingertips, and his sole is softer than a baby bottom.

He sticks it out from under the fur just to stare at it, then awkwardly removes himself from Yugi's knee.

His wound is gone, and it left behind no relics, not even a scar or a hair out of place.

He bends his foot and feels hopeful.

"This isn't just cosmetic," he says, "right?"

He stands on it gingerly, and just as promised, it's fixed.

Voila.

"I didn't think of it right away because I had to stick my foot in boiling oil," he says sincerely and tries to walk, "but I know the Fountain isn't permanent."

"It isn't. You gave it three days."

His lungs fill with ants, but he knows it's his own fault.

"So you fucked me over."

"Yes."

Atem looks at his beautiful foot. He's a stupid southern boy in the North, penniless and homeless, hungry, and just a little bit in love.

"...are you still fucking with me?"

"Yes," his witch chuckles.

Atem lets out a monstrous breath.

Stares at Yugi's black hands. Says "maybe you should take a bath in piss oil, no offense." out of spite. Regrets it immediately. 

"I can't offer it days I don't have," the Witcher picks at his sleeves and stretches them over his knuckles. "Your foot will last only three days, and you wouldn't walk on it if I didn't brew decay into it, and an unreasonable number of mending spells. A whole book of hexes and a pound of clover for luck. You wouldn't understand, but this is... very shoddy workmanship. Don't tell anyone this is my work. I'll patch it with a tattoo, an Undying seal, perhaps. Tsk. What a mess."

But his fussing sounds almost proud, like his success is an accomplishment despite how much he discredits it.

"Aren't there better ways," Atem says, and means _'I thought you were competent.'_ "I mean, I heard stories—"

"Oh, there are much better ways. Grand, painless, involve far more magic than what I owe you. I don't exactly have much to work with. And why are you still here? I didn't cure your temperature. Go to your place."

Atem remembers who it is that he's talking to and quietly shuffles to 'his place.'

He grabs the moonshine on his way, and as far as he's concerned, he over-shared for it and therefore it is his.

He even pours some for the Witcher who ignores is and brings a stack of dusty books to leaf through by the fireplace.

They don't look like the sort of books Atem should touch.

"Are there any going-home spells in that?"

Of course there are, Yugi tells him. Doesn't Atem have Magicians for friends? They should've taught him better than to even think about doing magic.

"Fine," he says, "may I have your arm?"

The witch turns his masked face to him. Very. Slowly.

"I grabbed you. When the.. you know. Oil. I shouldn't've done that. I should't've done a lot of things in the last few days. I'm really honestly very sorry, please don't do terrible witch things to me without giving me a chance. Let me?"

He takes the Witcher's arm just as gingerly as it was offered to him and checks it for scabs. It's hot and unpleasant in Atem's sticky hands, but he finds little black scars on his knuckles and cuticles around fingernails.

There's a clean rag handy, and when he finds them, he blots at little bloody crescents with moonshine.

It stings his witch. Atem knows, because muscles in Yugi's forearm contract and he almost - almost - flinches.

"Sorry," Atem says when he's done. "My hands are gross."

 _'No, your hands are gross,'_ he thinks. _'Yours are penance for the shit you do.'_

One of the baby feet from the Witcher's nastiest jar is missing. 

Atem pretends to go outside to piss, and instead scrubs his hands in the snow. 


	11. eleven

He lies half-naked under a quilt and hardly cares for the needle piercing the skin of his ankle. Well, he cares, but he has a complicated relationship with pain these days. He cares; he just can't do anything about it.

He's burning up - but not too much - and his leg is tied to the bedpost.

It's a precarious situation, made worse by the complacent lull of his fever. And his sweat, and messy sheets under his belly, and his labored breaths.

Atem kicks, apparently.

And, he's a lot more skiddish without hard drugs.

That's Yugi's excuse for bondage, and for him to trap Atem's legs under himself while he draws on his foot.

[[WITCHY THINGS]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145699994530/i-doodled-even-more-witcher-fanart-thanks-tunafax) (click)

Atem's got two healthy feet and he's not dying from infection.

Doesn't stop his skin from tingling under every touch.

Or needlework.

"You should deal for a t- ta? Teletattoo...graph. That sounds about right. Ow."

"A what?"

"It's this electrical tattooing engine. It's noisy. Ma- one of the Magicians had one imported."

"I have no electricity here."

"Then, I don't know... get some?"

The needle pauses, and Atem realizes just how tensely he clenched his thighs.  

"Do you know anything about electricity?"

"Well," Atem says, "no. Do you?"

"Not at all. It just appeared one day, like locomotives and chocolate. I get pounds of it in deals sometimes," the witch muses. "But not lately."

"Wow," Atem shrugs, folds his arms under his chin and stretches a bit. "Old. Let me see your hands."

"What will you give me?"

"I'm gonna touch your ugly hands. When was the last time someone offered to do that?"

Yugi resumes stabbing his foot, and Atem takes it as a small victory.

"I need more than that."

"Whatever. They're not old people hands, so they're probably not even yours."

"...I'm not old people."

Atem sulks, wipes his forehead into a cushion and wonders.

"Are you... people?"

It's always loud in the Witcher's hut. The wind howls in the day, and wolves at night, and time loses its meaning amidst the wailing of nature and everything trapped in its wake.

But it's quiet now.

Almost personal.

"I'm people."

"So if I turn around now—" he gives the Witcher's abandoned mask the stink-eye. It lies at his side like a thing and not a device for terror. It makes his skin crawl.  

"—I'll throw you out."

Atem winces and bites his tongue.

"Well. Definitely not doing that. Sorry."

He doesn't have a guarantee the Witcher won't just complete their deal and then steam Atem in one of his cauldrons, healthy foot and all, and kiss the flavor off his skin.

There's even a cauldron in the corner that would fit him, and the witch had set fire under it so casually that Atem put a few good meters between his barefoot ass and the house before Yugi cowed him back inside and sat on him.

Atem doesn't much like being tied to a bed - doesn't much like that large wooden bucket in the corner - but he's feverish and obedient because the stories he heard about the Witcher eating people involved siren songs and kidnapped brides, and Atem qualifies as at least one of those.

They were siren brides, the Witcher tells him in his husky whisper, and a rich eastern lord bought them from the slavers. He wanted to taste every kind of food and fuck every kind of girl, and he paid the Witcher in rubies to deliver. So the Witcher negotiated it down to the thing the lord loved most, and his siren brides sang him into oblivion as he sat in a boiling pot and ate his own—

"What's wrong with you," Atem gulps and shivers.

"I offer good deals too, but no one talks about them. That's why I get less and less of them, and instead, dead children."

"So ask for stuff you actually want. Like a tattoo engine, and blankets. A nice beach-side house with a view. Batarekh. Grapes."

"I don't get to pick what people value."

Atem tries not to ask much and stick to the Witcher's topics. Lets Yugi dictate  their conversations.

He likes Atem -  he's amused by him, perhaps - so Atem sucks it up and entertains.

And he really doesn't want to get turned into a stew, but he can't think of a better time to ask. They're on topic, and Yugi is in a friendly-enough mood. 

"So I'm really sorry to bother you, but I have a few questions."

"I would imagine you do."

"What do I have to do for them?"

"Hm," says Yugi and blots ink out of his savaged skin. "Depends."

Could be worse.

"They're about this," Atem says and pulls himself up to his elbows. He can't really reach too far, bondage and all, but his very fingertips brush the junk on the Witcher's nightstand. He tugs at one thing or other until what he's after reaches his hands.

Snatches the crown, triumphant.

Doesn't look back to check, but waves it to make sure Yugi sees it.

Picks at its edges after he settles back.

Tries to sound firm.

"It's one of my father's crowns, I think, he keeps these in a display. I want to know what the hell he's doing talking to _you_."

"Fair enough, I can answer that. I want..."

Oh dear Ra almighty andallholygods, the Witcher is pointing the giant-fucking-cauldron-in-the-corner _what the fuck._

"It's a _bath_ ," Yugi mutters and shoves him into the pillow by the scruff of his neck.

"That's not a bath, that's not a bath!" Atem's voice cracks and he thrashes. "No, please no, I'll be good!"

The Witcher crawls over him then, brisk, like a massive spider with just as many ugly legs touching him, stepping on him, compressing him against its nest of rags and furs and cushions. Atem clamps down and doesn't move, doesn't breathe, prays that his heart stops beating so fucking loud.

Pretends he died, braces himself for fangs and rot and venom.

Every whisper against his skin is a tiny bite - hairs tickling his neck, clothes settling after being ruffled, everything - and Atem plays dead, dead and uninteresting, makes a very dead noise in the back of his throat. 

It won't stop, the noise. It's a thin sound, tiniest shriek or even a whimper, and if anything would get him eviscerated for being absolutely pathetic, this sound may well do it,

Yugi pins him down with a knee to his back, braces himself on either side of Atem's head, and _shushes_ him.

Just tucks himself against Atem's shoulder and shushes him, venom breath against the shell of his ear, licking him with words and menace.

Atem feels the Witcher's face in the crook of his neck, and when he understands it for what it is, he wishes he was dead long before this.   

"Shush, boy." 

Atem shudders and manages to freeze the sound dead in his throat. The Witcher's whisper is solid without his mask, real, tinted with a voice and so close to him that he feels it resonate in every bone.   

"No... I shouldn't call you that. But you've been nothing but good. It's a bath. Breathe."

"I'm breathing," Atem whispers back. "I'm breathing."

"Are you sure? Because if you breathed more, you'd know you stink."

"Okay, yes, yes. Wait, I don't... I do?"

Humiliation sets in viscous sludge behind his cheekbones.

He shouldn't - can't - worry about such frivolous things in the fucking _Witcher's_ house, but he stinks, and the witch has to be the one to tell him that, and it's embarrassing.

Yugi sighs, exasperated.

"Your fear is exhausting," he says, snatches his mask and rolls off Atem.

Goes back to practicing his arts.

Berates Atem - the ink got smudged.

But he unties his foot, not that it was any kind of real restraint that would hold up if Atem took a weapon to it, like a broken mug or his teeth.

The witch doesn't touch him again. He likes to steal touches, likes feeling warm human skin under his dreadful hands. Atem knows, and Atem lets him, because he sees all there is to see of Witcher's life and understands what it's like to be stranded and alone with demons.

Yugi isn't stranded with his demons, he lives with them, alone in his shitty hut, hungry and completely fucking feral. And evil, and dreadful, and bad.

But Atem likes to think that he understands him just enough to play good and last the winter.

So he stays still and speaks softly.

"I'll be good," he says, "I promise."

"I believe you. You've been as good as I could reasonably hope. Much better on narcotics - but I've tossed all of them out - and you're just fine on your own."

"Right. I got kidnapped, stranded, murdered a girl, got my foot cut off, and pissed off," Atem drops his voice all scary-like, " _the Witcher_. I'm not stupid. Just a coward from the South. I swear I'll be good. Just don't, I don't know, make me eat my own face. If you're gonna kill me, please, I beg for dignity. I don't want to go in your cauldron. Yugi, _please_."

It's the 'Yugi' that earns him the Witcher's mercy, or perhaps he had it all along.

Yugi sets his needle down, then sits at Atem's side and taps his shoulder, makes Atem look his way, pats his hand.

"The last coward I had here," he says in a steady whisper, "soiled himself within a minute and sold his entire family just to get to the nearest town. You have a whole kingdom to sell."

"I'm not going to sell you anything."

Yugi just laughs at him.

"Coward, you say," he sounds almost fond. "Ah, you're still feverish, I guess we can forgo the bath until tomorrow, no reason you should look any more vulgar. Look at you, you're writhing. Get out of my bed, I'm not your cousin."

"If I make it till tomorrow," Atem says, defeated. "Because I'm gonna keep asking about my dad."

"I believe in you," says the Witcher. "Someone always makes a deal, but I believe in you."

"Thanks," says Atem.

 And then, "excuse _you_ , what the hell."


	12. twelve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YO YO look at this gorgeous art by ectology from the previous chapter [HERE](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145699994530/i-doodled-even-more-witcher-fanart-thanks-tunafax) (wow!).

"Because there is a naked man in my house," Yugi tells him and leaves.

Atem made it, and the cauldron is just a bath, and the tattoed seal on his healed foot itches.

His stomach is properly full of custard, and his shitty patchwork quilt is almost complete.

Life is good.

Atem's last proper bath in the North was in a town built around two miserable hot springs. It's a place at the foot of a mountain, far from fisheries and coal mines, half-way between the middle of nowhere and endless open farms of fur. The miserable town and it's puddles are out of the way for the easy, straight line that the rail tracks should've been.

And yet it's there, on the map and serviced by at least two railroad corporations that somehow manage to turn a profit transporting northerners to their resort town, where they can stew in a warm hole in the ground, crammed like sardines and smelling worse, gossiping about unclaimed gold mines, and unwed daughters of rail lords, and unfulfilled dragon quests, and - of course - what the Witcher does to the frozen corpses in the streets.

Atem stews in the Witcher's tub and leafs idly through his rented map.

Yugi does nothing to the bodies, apparently.

Butchers collect them at night when it's easiest to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye. Butchers collect them, and, for a small price, beggars live to see another bitter, hungry day.

"Hey," Atem had asked Yugi before the witch decided snow and nothingness needed more attention than a naked prince in his bathtub. "Do you ever leave? I mean, do you go to towns? I'm sure no one would even notice you if you wear a paper bag and some gloves."

So the Witcher told him about butchers, and towns, and what the governors like to trade for smooth operations. And no, he doesn't go anywhere. He hadn't gone anywhere in a long time.

"You should. There's this casino; they do magic shows, and then you go gambling. They have these cheating rooms, and it's for who can cheat the most. Saw a guy win with eight Aces, best thing I've seen in the North."

He turned then, leaned his elbows over the rim of the tub and rested his chin in his hands. 

"Let's play cards."

"There are no playing cards here," the Witcher told Atem sharply, then softened once he saw that Atem cringed and withdrew. "I have marbles and dominoes somewhere, but keep me out of it. I don't play games. We can look for them, after we check the traps."

"We're out of food?"

"Almost."

Atem knows he's an inconvenience.

Probably worse, a burden with no means to ease his impact on Yugi's resources.

So he soaks under a blanket of hot water for a minute longer and savors his good life.

But the moment his naked ass meets the cold air of the best heated hut money could never buy, he's  up North again, and everything is kind of terrible. 

He grins.

Hops around on his tiptoes and rubs himself dry, then shimmies into a change of clothes Yugi had left for him while the fireplace dries the only set Atem owns.

He traded a story for borrowing these, about how Mana got him to hide in a pot with her to scare the shit out of Seto when they could still fit into a pot (they probably still can), and Seto ever so casually dropped all three of his hatchlings into it and shut the lid. Atem even showed tiny gnaw scars on his elbows to prove it.    

He's careful with the Witcher's clothes, understandably vary of them because what if evil can cling between the threads and infect him with its wickedness? But they're warm and clean and well-cared for, and Atem can tell the lining of the trousers is ancient silk, and the buttons are silver.

Someone traded for this, and for the shirt, too, maybe a hundred years ago when such things were an unattainable luxury, but the sweater is well-worn and knitted by a hand of someone who is not good at it.

Yugi walks in on Atem sniffing his sweater.

The _Witcher_ walks in on Atem sniffing the _Witcher's_ sweater, and Atem would be terribly embarrassed by it if Yugi wasn't too busy adjusting his mask back to take any notice. He's sluggish, keeps scratching the back of his head. 

Brings his palm to his face every one in a while, like he's yawning, but the mask is in his way. 

He's annoyed by it. 

Lamely, Atem takes his time emerging through the collar of Yugi's sweater so he can hide from shame for as long as he can.

"Why did you leave, anyway?"

"There was a naked man in my house," Yugi insists.

Atem sucks in as much bravery as he can in one breath and stares into his glowing eyes because polite people look at each other when they converse. 

"And the naked man is grat - _hypothetically_ grateful - that you're so good to him."

"...you're welcome," Yugi mutters and sort of disregards his heroics. 

Drags his feet to his bed. 

Collapses into it.

Face first. 

Even Atem flinches on his behalf. 

"Ow," the Witcher says. 

 _Smart._ "Are you tired?"

Yugi has a brief and haphazard fight with the laces behind his head, rips some of his real hair in his struggle, chucks the mask aside and plants his real face into the cushion. 

"Mh. Stop talking."

The back of his head is jet black, with a patchy aura of violet that fades into blonde towards the front. The Witcher was born of magic, then, much like Atem when his mother chose to give her life so she wouldn't miscarry him.  

Except Yugi could well be stitched from body-parts, or grown in the dirt like a mushroom. What a burden it must be on whoever spawned him, Atem thinks, to know what deplorable monster became of their child.

Whoever it was, they're long dead, and if there's really any peace in the afterlife, surely they are not watching. 

Atem makes little noise on his way to the fireplace where he keeps his furs toasty warm. He takes them, thinks twice about what he's doing, then goes to drape them over his witch.

"No," he murmurs. "I have a summons, soon."

"Then I should keep talking to keep you awake."

"You keep me awake anyway."

"Then just go."

"Not enough," Yugi says and drags the quilt over himself, then curls up into just another lump among other lumps and pillows. "He's trying to pay with his porcelain cat collection. Nearly scraped enough for a call."

"Useless," Atem mutters. "Is it okay to talk about... you know? I'll tell you a story later, if you want."

 "Yes," Yugi says, and then chuckles lazily with that altered whisper of his. "A thousand and one Arabian nights. Hah, as long as you're not screaming."

In 'his place' on the floor by the fireplace, Atem still gets by on whatever sleep he can manage between persistent bouts of crippling dread. He's secure in his furs, warm and comfortable and tired, but then the Witcher stirs, or the flames cast an odd shadow, and Atem thinks will never ever sleep again.

And so he spent another night with turbulent thoughts for company.

Yugi doesn't mean him any harm, not in an active way. He takes everything in stride, and all that really bothers him has to do with unfinished chores and panic fits.

He likes Atem.

But he makes no promises.

None at all.

He doesn't promise that he will keep Atem safe and spend the winter dispelling every ill rumor, and then part ways with him as a good friend. Not that he won't hurt him, that he won't throw him out into the cold, or save him from his next stupid injury.

Nothing.

It's disorienting.

So Atem takes it upon himself to approach the witch as soon as he's up, sits at the foot of his chair, obedient and huddled in borrowed furs, and promises him that he'll try to stop screaming, that he'll do his best to behave, and tells him honestly that he's mortified to bunk with the Witcher and just a little bit enchanted.  

Yugi knows.

Yugi checks that the wind has calmed and opens shutters on the only glass window in his house, from the inside and outside, and lets white light wash over the eerie orange gloom of his hut.

Atem grins then, takes his bath, and doesn't stop grinning for hours until he's ready to bring up a difficult conversation. 

"I..." he says and pets the edge of Yugi's bed, then remembers he's not welcome to sit there. "I think I'm ready to hear about my dad now."

"You were ready earlier. I really did mean it when I said it's nothing too awful. He wants you back. You're worth everything to him."

"He's not going to pay everything. Whatever he offers, please don't accept."

"If his offer is fair, I..." Yugi sighs, gropes around for his mask and sits up holding it to his face with just his hand. So Atem nods and looks at the floor the entire way to the other end of the room where he is expected to stay. "You make everything so difficult, Atem. I will always accept fair offers."

"I figured," Atem mutters and finds himself a chair. "So I'm still here. What did he get?"

"He knows you are alive, and that I have you. For this information, he agreed to abdicate on the first day of spring."

Atem's gut drops and he clenches his fists.

"Not too bad," the Witcher adds, "he was going to abdicate on your twentieth anyway."

"You bastard," Atem hisses before he can stop himself.

He promised.

He promised!

He promised himself he'd make peace with whatever his father sold for his stupid mistakes, but-

The Witcher rises, and Atem bows his head and squeezes the biggest lie through his teeth: that he's sorry, that it's fine.

"Nothing that involves me is ever fine, and you're not sorry. You know I don't like lies."

"It just came out," he cringes. He knows what's coming.

The Witcher. 

The Witcher is coming.

He stalks to where Atem hangs his head, looms long enough for Atem to scare himself into an early grave before he as much as touches a hair on his head.

Hops onto an adjacent chair, stands on it.

Lets Atem snivel.

Squats.

He's still holding his mask, but his free hand lands on Atem's forehead, traces a straight line down his nose and lips - like he wants to cut him in half at the seams - presses his hideous thumb into Atem's mouth. 

"My prince," he hisses and almost sings his vowels, makes Atem look at him, holds his chin in place and _makes him look._ "Everyone lies. Everyone makes deals. You're worth a war now, one the North wanted for centuries."

[[EVERYONE LIES]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145743726010/uhh-morewitcher-doodles) (click)

"You don't care what the North wants," Atem says and barely hears his own words. They're just a breath with faint clicks and licks, and he hopes this time the Witcher doesn't hear his smart mouth. "What do you want?"

Yugi drags his hand down his throat, fingers feather-light and dangerous, down, until it comes to rest over his heart.

"Ingredients."

Atem wouldn't be able to look away now if he tried. He stares into pinhole lights, imagines cat slits or scarred up hollows behind them, takes the black hand from his heart and drags it _down_. 

Down his chest, down his stomach. 

Down. 

The Witcher backhands him for it. Lightly, but Atem's cheek burns all the same. 

Both of his cheeks burn. 

"I think you're lying, too."

Yugi hops off the chair. His legs are thunder against the floor, thunder on a still and clear day, and it's thunder and reason that snap Atem out of his daydream and he realizes he's been bewitched.

"I want you," Yugi says and sits down properly, even leans in on his elbow a bit, "to leave now. Or to stay with me  _forever_. Not your forever. _My_ forever. I can't have what I want, so I'll take your stories, or your parts."

"You want to touch me."

"Not in a way you think."

What other fucking way is there, what, hold the Witcher while he takes his nap? Or does he want Atem to hold his ugly hand, is that it?

So Atem takes his ugly hand, and holds it. 


	13. unlucky thirteen

"Do you know your way to the fish traps?"

Atem does, and it's his chore to check the first one - just one - and hurry back because the Witcher doesn't trust him to bring back all four of his limbs if he stays out longer.

The summons is about to go through, and Yugi tells him he will vanish outside so that a sizable porcelain cat hoard doesn't end up inside the house.

Atem walks him out and stares at endless snow banks that just to go on forever, in the clearings and between the trees, littered right off the main path as if purposely placed there.   

"Is there a cemetery?" he asks when he realizes what lies beneath the snow. "Where you put, you know."

"Yes. Far out that way."

"Do they have... graves? Or do you just. Stack."

"The earth is frozen under the snow."

"I want a proper grave."

"Then don't die here," the witch tells him solemnly. "One trap. _One_. And bring a cat inside, if you like any."

Atem sighs.

"If the cat man has dinner set out, just stare at it," he suggests. "He'll probably throw it in."

"I always do, if there is any. Nobody summons the harbinger of doom to the kitchen."

It isn't right that only the Witcher's clients get to have the things they need.

"There isn't a thing in the world that I need," Yugi says and vanishes.

 _'You need a heart,'_ Atem thinks, and idly sorts through someone's precious cat dolls.

They're total junk, all of them.

He feels like an ass for thinking it, because they mean something unfathomable to someone desperate. But then, all the junk in the snow meant something to someone, totally useless to anyone else, and yet Yugi took away such precious things as payment and buried them here.  

But in the end, it's just junk, frozen in time by snow and bitterness, destined to exist uselessly and never perish.  

When Atem goes to the fishing trap, and he's never felt so alone. The map of the most northern part of the North seared itself into his brain along with many other searing experiences, much more painful and equally horrid.

He knows exactly how far he'd have to walk to find another soul.

Walk, of course, is a loose term. He doesn't quite have a word for what it's like to drudge through snow that's up to his waist and colder than a lead casket. He's sure northerners have one - many - but having a name for it won't help him.

He passes the clearing where he took a life from a desperate girl, and there isn't even a trace of her.

If her entire caravan really is frozen in the woods, then there is nothing left of her at all.

 The only trace she left is in Atem's mind, scarred up and ugly, and Atem tries to think of traps and fish and snow and look ahead, only ahead.

It's a tedious ordeal, to shovel the snow and crack the ice.

It's worse when the trap is stuck, and he grits his teeth and rolls up his sleeve and plunges his hand into what feels like a jar of barbs and shattered glass.

Two miserable fish thrash in the mesh box.

Two miserable fish, probably as hungry as he is.

 He tries to pull them out, but his fingers are numb and wooden, and his dinner is slippery.

They slip through his hands.

Fall back into the hole.

Live.  

Atem swears, swears at the fish, himself, gods.

But his stomach rumbles, and nature doesn't care how much he can stomp his foot and curse.

So Atem sets the trap.

Bundles the fuck up, and goes to the second trap, and then the third and fourth, and hauls back a week's worth of bland stews and awkward domesticity.

It's around the clearing where he killed the girl that his foot begins to ache.

It's a dull pain, in the wound that isn't there, and it nags him for a quarter of a mile until it spreads, like rot or bad breath after a night of drinking.

And then he falls into the snow, screams, swears.

Dares to check it - and there is no wound, but scabby tattoo and down it's all sickly dark.

It never quite crosses the threshold between a dull ache in the back of his mind, but he losses motion in his foot as if the fix never happened at all.

Fuck the Witcher, fuck his shit spells, fuck this and fuck _him_!

Atem keeps his fucking fish and stumbles, then drags his foot, then hops, and at the end _crawls_ from assfuck nowhere to the porch of his home, screams at it to open itself, but Yugi's home and he receives Atem with a loaf of bread and worry.

"It broke, didn't it? Tsk. Inside, now."

"Did my leg brea– Are you fucking–  Fuck you!"

The witch takes Atem's fish, lets him salvage his manners and hang his coat. It's caked with white bullshit and Atem swears at it, and at Yugi, and hops his way to 'the fucking fireplace.'

"No," Yugi orders. "Pants off, in bed."

Atem's nostrils flare as he does it - obeys and does as he's told - and doesn't really think about it until he's sitting in the Witcher's bed and staring at his bare knees.

"Wait," he says. His teeth chatter, and he's cold, cold, _cold_. "I don't like this. I don't like how we left things, and I don't like this."

"It's been three days," Yugi tells him and hands him a heated quilt, a hot towel, and a single warm sock. "I told you, one trap. This is at least four, you were gone for hours. Stupid. Lie down, on your front."

He's not wearing his rat coat, and Atem thinks if he came back a minute sooner, he would've caught him with his mask off.

He's so much smaller in his house clothes, so human.

Atem doesn't want to be anywhere near him. If this sort of thing would ever happen between them, he doesn't want it to surprise him. 

"...I don't need to lie down if you want to check my foot."

"I know what happened to it," Yugi dismisses him and - oh, well, he puts his dirt hand on Atem's stomach, sort of tips him lightly and eases him down.  

Then hops on. His hair swishes through the air like it's liquid tar, and, just as Atem pulls up on his elbows, the Witcher straddles him.

Knees to hips and everything.

Pins fill up Atem's lungs, and terror of looking right at the Witcher's damn mask sinks into every pore of his shivering body. Yugi's very quick with his hands and–

Atem doesn't–

This isn't–

"Oh," says Yugi like he remembered he left the stove on, and hops right off. "Pardon me. I forget, sometimes, that you all have autonomy."

Atem is working on getting his soul to come back to his body, so all he manages is a miserable "What..?"

"I meant to fix you, not to take your eyes out. It it doesn't matter in the end, but I imagine you'd like to know what's about to happen to you. I forgot that you'd probably want that. I'm very," he adds, "very tired."

"Well," Atem's voice cracks, "yeah?"

"Undying on your foot failed 'cause you have a hex on you. I'll do an Everlasting."

"That really isn't the part I care about," Atem shrinks between his shoulders and throws alarmed glances around the room.

"Ah. I'm going to give you a blessing and another tattoo."

Blessing, in witch, means kissing. Atem stares at a flickering oil lamp. 

"Alternatively, you can stick your foot into boiling oil."

"Tough choice," Atem tells him seriously.

Yugi chuckles and orders him to close his eyes.

"Why kissing."

"Inoculation."

"Oh. Same spell that's keeping you alive?"

"Among other things. Close 'em."

He doesn't jump Atem's bones this time, and Atem is spared from rethinking just how repulsive he imagines the Witcher to be two weeks into his stay with him.

Instead, he sits at Atem's side and reaches for his eyes with a cupped hand, tilted slightly and loose and nothing like paws or talons that his hands are best suited to be.

And so Atem takes one uncertain peak into the mask, closes his eyes, and feels his eyelashes catch between gentle fingers. And then the world is blacker than his dreams, darker than the hut when no one stays to tend the fire.

A thrill pounds through his chest and he forgets to breathe. No-no, _terror_ beats in his chest, he reminds himself, and _terror_ stops his breathing.

It's not like that. It's not, but he can't deny that not every shudder and flinch is a testament to the cold weather.

He hears whispers of skin against wood, a soft thud at his side, expects fangs on his lips.

Expects the stench of rot and blood, so when Yugi presses his wicked mouth to his forehead, he doesn't quite expect it.

He doesn't feel fangs, or wrinkles ancient enough to hide dimes between their folds.

It's a lingering 'blessing.'

Longing, kind.

And it's through a gap between Yugi's fingers that Atem finally catches it - his first look at the Terror of the North. Atem peeks, and an ivory jaw line he sees isn't monstrous or inhuman. It's sweetly curved, with sweet lips, and Atem wonders how many stupid princes fell to their death chasing the Witcher's glamour. 

The Witcher must've felt the flutter of eyelashes against his soft palm.

He must know, but no rain or hellfire breaks through the roof, and Atem isn't propelled outside to where the corpses are stacked high in the makeshift cemetery.

[[SMOOCH]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145790125050/doodling-more-witcher-to-warm-up) (click)

Instead, Yugi ends their brief contact with a smooch and almost - almost - withdraws, then decides fuck that, quickly pecks Atem's cheek, and only then hides behind his mask.

He isn't even subtle, just plops it on, presses his face to the knees to hold it in place, and ties the strings in the back like he's a girl tying her hair.

"Why do you even bother?"

"Give me something valuable, and I'll take it off."


	14. fourteen

"An Everlasting seal," Yugi tells him and unsubtly pushes him to lie on his stomach, "is officially a blessing, and not even your Magician friends will tell you otherwise, though they know it's a lie. It's one of those taboo things across the disciplines, like they'll tell you if you manage to impregnate a corpse the children would be abominable. Children turn out just fine. And an Everlasting is a curse."

"You just said it was taboo."

"I'm a taboo, too."

He lets Atem settle into his bed, even throws a quilt over him - but tells him not to get too comfortable because he's not really injured, and so the bed is for homeowners and the floor is for house guests.

 "Feels pretty injured to me," Atem says. "No offense to your work."

"I told you it was a mess, I repair pots with more magic than what I put into your leg. Undead was worth a try."

"Then use more magic."

"I don't owe you more."

"Well, you're about to use more now, so-"

"Wrong. Everlasting is free. All you need is a blessing  and the spell. Though I admit it's a very difficult glyph with pesky rays. Undead is a rune and a half, and a dash of oregano. Hm. The longest ray would go..."

His fingers leave Atem's ankle where they picked at the scab over his useless tattoo. Yugi holds his leg down, like he's not sure what made Atem kick the first time it got tied up.

Climbs the bed.

Hovers.

Trails up Atem's calf, presses his fingers firmly to his skin. They're hot and pleasant, right until they reach the underside of his knee.

He's very tender there, and Atem shivers and keeps very still. And the Witcher just keeps going, up and up, up the curve of his thigh and then higher still.

He stops about half-way to Atem's ass, presses hard into his flesh and traces a little circle.

"...up here. Pass me the ink kit, it's right next to you."

"Uh," says Atem and feels the Witcher's weight settle on his legs, and then the jab of five tiny needles packed into a tiny point of pain.

He jerks.

And Yugi is not heavy, and Atem promises - swears - he's not doing it on purpose, please don't tie him down, this whole predicament feels very unsavory as it is.

"I guess you're right. Your father made it very clear what he'd do to me if I put you in exactly such predicament. Don't use black magic, don't touch. I'll wait for his wrath, then."

Atem tenses at the mention of his father, tries his best to hold back his grudge.

But hell, the Witcher knows. The Witcher knows everything.

"You're not doing what he meant by 'touching,' or black magic."

"Sure doesn't feel like it, does it?" Yugi says and pierces a particularly painful point in Atem's thigh. "Well, it's all black. And I don't touch you without a good reason."

Yugi's touch is a hand cupping Atem's thigh to even his skin for the punishing touch of his needle. His touch is a solid weight across Atem's legs, gentle and mindful, if not a touch troubling. There is a touch of him in Atem's dreams, in every thought he's had since he met the Witcher and grew used to the touch of fear he had even in his kindest words.

Atem made peace with it.

They live together, and they'll bump shoulders and arms and knees. It's an inevitability born out of necessity and  Atem's will to get through this thing and survive it.

And then he'll go home and forget all about the Witcher and his soft touch so unreasonably close to his privates.

"And I like touching you. I miss it," Yugi says, then pauses. "Your stay here is cruel."

"I– " Atem tries, but he doesn't have much to say to that.

"Alright, that will do. You'll feel a bit of a shock in just a minute. Don't kick."

Shock, right. _Ecstasy_. It sears his forehead where the memory of Yugi's kiss still lingers like an unwashed stain, then spreads downward and makes his hairs stand, makes his skin receptive and sensual.

It nips down the nape of his neck, down, down, everywhere.

His fingertips tingle viciously once the tide reaches them, warm and sandy and familiar, and suddenly Yugi's bedding is fine and delicate beneath them.

_Down._

Down his spine and right through it - down his chest and belly, into his groin - and gods, Atem wants it to stay exactly there - then licks its way along his oversensitive thigh, into the rune.

Stops, smolders for a moment.

Fizzles out, and disappoints worse than a half-finished wet dream. 

"O-okay," Atem groans and drools a bit into the pillow. "Nnh."

Yugi laughs at him. It's got a ring to it, and his voice is pleasant. And he's warm, gods, he's warmer than summer - warmer than home. Atem wouldn't mind if something happens now, _now_ , when his witch is tired stupid and Atem is stupid enough to want something like that from him.

And then the texture of the air changes, and with it, his daydream, snaps like a taught cord and tosses Atem straight off the pillows. 

"Mind out of the gutter!" Yugi says and slaps his legs. "You'll walk just fine for now. I'll finish later, get out of my bed, go outside!"

"Wh–"

"Out!"

Walls close in, and touch becomes bad - touch becomes vicious and dangerous, hauling and dragging and towing. Claws dig into his arm, claws shove him to the door. Without a coat, without pants, and shit, Atem as good as runs for the door himself, because behind him, behind him–

The goddamn Witcher. The one from the stories, the one that haunts every northerner like a bad dream.

[[BREATHE]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145850807095/even-more-witcher) (click)

Fresh air as good as slaps him and pinches his cheeks with bitterness.

But he can breathe.

Here, in the night as black as Yugi's hands, he can _breathe_.

 It comes back to him then, who he is and what he's doing out here.

Fear gives way to sanity, and Atem feels broken glass in his legs, his arms, face, everywhere.

Cold.

It dawns on him in a very numb sort of way that he has no layers, no pants or shoes, no lights except yellow glimmer flickering through cracks in the home behind him.

(He should really get them patched, he thinks.)

And the night is black, still, unmerciful.

He turns, faces the door that's shut to him now, slammed behind him in the midst of Witcher's fury, sees light pouring through a gap.

He touches it, fingertips over rough wood, tenderly as if the little flicker is a dear lover.

He rests his forehead against the wood.

"Why."

There would be wolves.

There would be wolves,  but his mind is as numb as his bare feet, and he thinks maybe he should just sleep in the snow.

"I didn't do anything wrong."

Nothing.

Not that he expects much; his words are as soft as the little light at his fingertips.

"May I come in?" he whispers and rests his forehead against the wood. "May I, Yugi? Please."

He may.

He sucks air like he was starved for it - gasps, perhaps - when he sees the sideways sunrise of his home. The crack grows as the wind and gravity of poor engineering take their course, and behind the door - nothing.

No one.

"I'm... home?" he calls numbly as he steps over the threshold. Some call, he lost his voice - and his sentiments along with it.

And then he sees him, just next to the door, in the blind spot where a creature would hide and ambush and slaughter. There the Witcher hides, there he sits, on the floor in his inside clothes, with his knees pulled up, with his masked face resting in them.

Atem shuts the door; the heat is escaping, and they can't have that.

He shuts it with his back and slides down its bumpy finish, grinds his spine against it.

Drops to the floor, too, next to him - next to the _Witcher_.

Sleeps.

They both sleep. 


	15. fifteen

It's unsettling how easy it is to fall into a routine, even with the unlikeliest of housemates.

Winters here are unkind, and Atem learns that there is nothing northern that can’t get worse just when he finally gets used to its preexisting misery. 

Daylight lasts them just hours, and the sun that brings it blinds worse than cheap moonshine.

Yugi’s moonshine had quality to it, for all of one time Atem got to enjoy it. He was well on his way to a temporary reprieve only oblivion can provide out here, when Yugi called him outside for no good reason other than to keep the stench off his floors.

And Atem, predictably, took the jar with him, and the Witcher, unsubtly, snuck up on him and scared him out of his skin and the alcohol out of his hand. And then there is no more moonshine.

But there is the Witcher, and the musty smell of his bed, and the stab of a needle on quiet evenings when there is very little to do except work on the complex thing that keeps his foot intact, and Atem thinks that all it does for him is complicate his feelings when his blood freezes solid and his fluttering heart does not.

("Why - ow - not just leave it? It, ow, works.")

("It works because it expects me to complete it. Did your cousin teach you to moan like that?")

It gets colder. It’s in their house now – the cold – and they trek to the shed and take spare furs from it. If they get caught in a blizzard again, there will be no shelter.

And the blizzards come at them furious, and with them, _deals_.

One after another, in the dead of night and in the middle of rabbit snaring. Payments get more desperate with each call. The further out the Witcher goes before he vanishes the less he wants Atem to see the horrible thing that displaces him. Or, perhaps, he doesn’t want to face the evil of his own making.

A week passes, and Atem is out of his mind with cabin fever.

“Do you have books?” he says after a day and a half of being imprisoned by a particularly nasty storm. “I’ll make you a friendship bracelet.”

The Witcher pauses sprinkling ash of a bird he burned alive over whatever the fuck he’s got in his smoking plate.

“Done. Learn to specify, I could well take your bracelet just for saying ’yes, I do have books.’ Your deals are bad.”

Atem peaks at Yugi’s magic on his way to grab the colored yarn. The Witcher is using a teacup to strain blood through an ugly dream catcher, and the runes for it are written on the back of trash.

“I didn’t forget where I am and who you are, not even once,” Atem says. “But you enjoy it, don’t you? When I’m being dumb? I’m not that stupid, you know. I made it almost a month without making a deal.”

“You are very,” Yugi turns to him and tilts his mask for effect, “ _very_ stupid.”

Atem jumps a little and gulps.

There, the witch got his fear mongering done for the hour.

“Would you please give me a book anyway?”

“Promises are binding contracts,” he says and scavenges for trash that could serve as paper. Picks up the closest thing, writes lazily on it. “I don’t think you’d find them interesting. Don’t really have reading material right now.”

“Do you write spells in the margins or something?”

“I can’t stand to read the same thing twice; I’d rather rip them for spells than get paper from the cellar.”

Atem can tell.

His junk spell is blue now, and the plate it’s in is crusting with crystals. It begins to spit sparks.

“Are you making one of those little firework things? Or that smoke that changes color? One of the Magicians would show me when we were ten, I think those are the first spells she learned.”

He doesn’t remember it requiring blood, but this one looks fairly unimportant.

It’s not like there are many spells that would be simple enough for a teacup.

“No.” Yugi tells him. “I like red and gold. You seem to be making a bracelet. And this is… a summons, if you will. For one of the underworld lords from below the crust.”

Atem chokes on nothing.

“Not _here_. One of the flesh eating ones, she’s going to a plague town.”

“Oh,” Atem exhales, “you’re fucking around.”

“Nope.” He motions vaguely at a ball he made earlier, out of little bones and diamonds and some other crap. “That would do it. This is a leash. I need to put her back after she’s sated.”

“That’s a fucking teacup. I had tea in that. _No_.”

“Yes. Were you expecting more glamour?”

“You’re…” Atem is at loss. “You’re supposed to… respect the magic? On big clear paper to see if you fucked up? In a cauldron so that if you add too much it kind of saturates out by volume??”

“Ah. All of those are correct. You’re closer to the Magicians than I thought.”

“I…” he tries. “If I’m going to be turned into a fleshy monster when that blows up, I’d like a warning.”

Yugi turns his way, slowly. He’s been considerate lately, made few sudden movements and let Atem have his space.

He turns, and then chucks something at Atem, and Atem thinks it’s a rock or a knife. But he’s a creature of instinct and muscle memory more often than not, and so he catches it before it can smack him in the face.

He looks at it.

“AaaaAA!!”

It’s the demon ball, it’s the demon ball!

What the fuck! It’ll melt his hands off, fucking hell!

"Heh! Hot potato. Fine, you can bring it back now. Don’t question my ability again.”

Atem moonwalks the fuck away from it after he puts it on the very edge of the table, as far from being near Yugi as he can.

“I might give you a spell book.”

Atem stuffs himself into his corner and tells the witch as politely as he can that (if it was unclear in any way) he doesn’t have magic.

“You shouldn’t; doesn’t mean you can’t. Tether to something, borrow it.”

“The Magicians,” Atem reminds him about the time he wanted a spell to leave, “taught me to know better.”

“Atem,” the Witcher puts down the crap he’s jinxing, like he’s explaining something important. To someone stupid. Very, _very_ stupid. “Either of your Magician friends would take one look into my house, and excommunicate themselves from the Guild just for seeing my things.”

“I know where I am,” Atem mutters. “I don’t really know what ‘bad’ looks like, but I expected your stuff to be all bad.”

Yugi shouldn’t be too sloppy with his spells after all, because he finds something under his fingernails and picks at it for a good minute.

“Am I what you expected?”

“Sometimes,” Atem finds a splinter in his hand. “Often.”

“You shouldn’t say that to me.”

Atem stares at him until he thinks it’s unsafe to stare more.

“I’m making the Witcher a fucking friendship bracelet so that he doesn’t eat me tomorrow. I should be on my knees praying to you every day.”

“Well, I do recall you like to be on your knees at home. A lot.”

“I beg your _pardon?_ “Atem splutters, trapped in an offended limbo with a disgusting image in his head that he dreaded imagining for quite some time now because doesn't quite know what to do with it. 

"How old are you, anyway," the Witcher laughs at him, and his creepy mask tilts Atem's way.

"Eighteen,”Atem turns to him, and they stare at each other for a solid minute. "Oh, _go fuck yourself._ "

His skin crawls, but Yugi just turns back to his spell.

“Heh,” he says.

And beckons, absently with just his fingers. 

_And fucking beckons._

"No."

"Do you enjoy being dragged?"

There is a deep scratch in the floor boards, from when Atem tried to claw himself to a stop with his nails and a fork. 

(He bent the prongs back into place and apologized for it.)

Gingerly, Atem shuffles his way. It's a one-man funeral procession, and the coroner is too preoccupied with his tea cup to pay him any real attention, except he has a message and barely any understanding that Atem is a real person who continues to exist even when Yugi isn't actively thinking about him. 

And that's Atem's strong preference, anyway, out of sight and out of mind. So he drags his feet and comes. The witch just reaches for him absently, pulls on his hair until Atem's sitting at the foot of his chair and trying to shake his grip. 

Yugi looks down then, lets his concoction fizzle, tucks a lock behind Atem's ear. 

Pats his head, ghosts his fingers along the sides of his face. 

"I know what everyone wants. I know what you want, every little thing."

"Oh," Atem says, because he knows the punishment for lying. 

"I don't like it," Yugi warns him, and there's an edge to it. 

"What, is it all black and flaccid?"

He bites his tongue right away. He knows he shouldn’t have said that.

He should _not_ have said that, and the next ‘heh’ he hears is forbidding, viscous in the gross way gunk on the bottom of a bowl bothers him until he cleans it.

Atem shrugs into his shoulders, doesn’t look Yugi’s way at all, and slowly, ever so slowly, brings his hands to his mouth.

Clamps it shut.

 _Stupid_.

"I can stitch it shut for you," the Witcher says and yanks him by the hair, makes him look up - but Atem keeps his eyes down. "Bring me your needles."

He shakes his head, protects his mouth. 

"I can take your tongue out."

[[NOT A CAT]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/145927142335/here-is-even-more-witcher-fanart) (click)

He leaps out of his chair as Atem shakes his head again, spins on his heel and lands on the floor across from him, cross-legged and fluid in his movements down to his hairs that fall loosely onto his shoulders long after he lands. Like a cat - except Atem loves cats - so nothing like a cat at all. 

"Don't want that, do you? So you roll naked around my house, say filth to me? Goad me into putting hands on you?"

 Atem unclamps his mouth just enough to say, "you can't blame me for things you want me to do," and he's an idiot for it because the Witcher snatches his hands. 

Pins them down at Atem's sides, leans in close. 

"I don't like it," he hisses, makes the edges of Atem's vision fade to black. "I said 'guest,' not a confused, horny brat. I had a pet, here. Once."

Did he eat it...

Yup, yup he ate it. 

Atem is very grateful for this story. Two friendship bracelets.  

The Witcher shakes him for a bit, terrorizes him back into his corner, and something in his depraved brain must have rusted away with age and bitterness, froze all the way down to his tiny, black heart.

And it's black. Atem knows it's black, just like his hands. It pumps tar and depravity through his veins.

It must, if, after all _that,_  the Witcher thought it fit to say: 

"You know, I can make friendship bracelets, too.”


	16. sixteen

He's a day late, and worry rumbles in the pit of Atem's stomach.

He doesn't touch more than his share of the rations and lets the fresh fish from the traps freeze under the porch, though he knows Yugi won't know if he indulged in a real meal for once.

He worries until night returns, bitterer than ever, but his witch does not return at all.

He waits, and there is banging against their flimsy door, but it's only the storm that could care less for Atem's company, just the warmth it could freeze right in his bones. Yugi is a day late from his two-day trek to the other side of the lake, and he brought quilts and food with him to lodge in the shed for the night, and there is banging against the door, and nothing is more dreadful finding no one on the other side of it.

And so Atem waits. And waits.

Sleep nags his mind with indoor terrors, with shadows and jars and spells. He’d rather there be footprints in the snow - footprints in the hut, disembodied and sinister, than to deal with how utterly alone he is without Yugi.   

His night terrors about someone howling just outside in pain and solitude are no better, but he doesn't even brave the door because he knows the wind will pin the door open again, and then it's lights out for both of them.

Atem wakes at first light, and the morning is stiller than a cooling battlegrounds.

He eats his ration, packs two lunches, digs his way out of the hut and trips over enough buried branches to scab the hell out of his shin if his magical shin was prone to damage, brings them inside for firewood, and goes to find his witch.

The glare from the snow is like acid to his brain

The air is needles in his lungs.

He wraps his scarf over his face and trudges to the lake, but the snow is the selfsame smooth featherbed wherever he goes.

Tracking in the snow is shit business. If he had a dog... but what sane dog would come out with a stupid southerner in this cold, especially when it's evil of the North he's looking for?

Turns out, Evil of the North is dumber than his dumb landmark poles. Even the pillars bowed to the storm the night before, with not a hint of directions anywhere.

Atem has his lunch before he finds the place a tree had fallen on a pole and buried it along with a way home.

He's being stupid, he thinks. The Witcher has lived here for centuries, he must know every fucking inch of this frozen hell. He must've spent the night at the fishing shack across the lake and waited out the storm. Atem is wasting his time - and their food - and daylight.

But the storm still howls in his memory. He heard pain, raw and bitter, and he knows he didn't really _hear_ what he thinks he heard because they don’t share a ~very special connection~, but he has a bad feeling and-

-and another hidden branch trips him.

It's dusk.

He should go back.

Instead he sits on a fallen tree, lets his teeth chatter against his second lunch, and contemplates his options.

If he wanders further out, night will catch him. But if Yugi started out at first light like Atem had, they would've met by now.

Maybe a summons; someone always makes a deal.

Maybe another shack.

But there's a sinking feeling in his stomach, and it isn't hunger.

It's colder than this cold, and he's just about angry enough at Yugi over his disregard for _punctuality_ to dig through every lilac snow bank until he's walking his damned witch home.  

It hits him soon enough that sunset is orange and snow is white, and lilac is not a natural glow the branch that tripped him should be emitting.

He backtracks through the trench he made with his body and wipes a bit of snow to the side with the hand that isn't holding his bread.

Then he tosses the bread away like the worst houseguest the Witcher could've picked in the middle of a frozen famine, really, because this goddamn branch is wearing a goddamn glove - and it's not a branch - it's a tar hand, and it's rigid.

Fuck.

Atem digs into snow with his hands, and ice, razor-sharp and nasty, goes up his sleeves and around the rims of his in-out-in-out knitted mittens, but he doesn't care.

It's Yugi's arm, and Atem's sweat starts freezing on his forehead by the time he finds his whole witch, rigid and frozen solid.

He knows these _things_ don't… just die.

The Witcher won’t just die – and Atem has long suspected that he _can’t._

But this is death.

Atem knows what he sees - he's been seeing stone-cold corpses lining the streets ever since he entered this godforsaken country.  

Atem screams at him, shakes him, but the dead witch doesn't as much as blink flicker his pinhole lights at him - but they're still glowing, so that must be good.

His body still bends at its joints, though with great difficulty, but it's heavy, and his skin is barely warmer than the snow when Atem touches it in search for a pulse.

A minute passes before he feels it beneath his fingertips, and another before there is a second.

It's vile magic, and Atem would reel at something so foul that it would keep a person in the throes of death for what must be a full day, but just a hair away from it.

What if Atem never came looking, ate his food, and left in spring?

Would he suffer this–  this–  for months–

The Witcher _has_ suffered this. In the eons he spent in the North, there is no way a bad storm never caught him, no way he never once succumbed to an unkind winter or ten, and the stories made his absences into his _wrath_ when not even the most desperate of petitioners could summon him.

And if Yugi could spare himself this, he would.

Anyone would.

Freezing like this even once is horrible–

“Go back.”

Atem squeezes his frozen hand and drops onto his knees.

“Thank the gods, can you move, let’s get you home, alright? Can you stand-”

“Go.”

It takes Atem’s numb mind a minute to realize what is being asked of him.

“I’m not leaving you here!”

“A week. I’ll come. Go.”

_What?_

No. No, Atem isn’t going to wait until fucking tomorrow, forget a fucking week until his whatever magics get their shit together and bring this witch home to him.

But this is gross.

This is beyond disturbing.

Atem would vomit, but he swallows the bile down, whispers to the witch that he'll be right back and that he's sorry, pats its mask, and goes _back._

It's so dark that he can barely see his own tracks, but he returns with torches, and a sled, and the night is black and stiller than his friend, and he would think it's mercy if he didn't know the wolves thought it mercy, too.

He thinks of the wolves and their maws, how their blood would freeze on their muzzles.

He thinks of this as he's shoving his witch onto the sled - thinks if the witch even can come 'alive' if it's body is picked so clean by scavengers that its bones turn whiter than snow - prays to southern gods to protect his oil lamp from the wind, to keep beasts off his tracks.

It's so black that he can see nothing but two feet ahead of his light, and he's lucky that his sled left a wide track. But his load is heavy. It's heavy and Not Dead and Atem tries to not think about it, because he'd rather Yugi died than - than _this_.

His body aches for what feels like hours, and he'd give anything to allow himself a short rest - just a short stop, he could sit on the sled next to Yugi for a little while, rest, maybe a nap, yes, just a little one.

But the idea of the Witcher's not-dead body next to him is so pungent that it keeps his legs moving, and then - then he's home - _they're home._

He drags the frozen witch inside, bars the door, and screams.

Wolves answer his call, but his witch is dead right on the floor they lined with rags together -dead, very dead and still sort of talking - and Atem sheds his coat that's as rigid and heavy as steel,  sheds his layers - sheds _their_ layers - his coat, his sweater, Yugi's cloak, Yugi's robes–

If the witch isn't all the way dead, then Atem will surely get gutted, just for doing this.

His fingers won't bend around fastenings. So he tears at them, and everything is so black, his clothes, his hands, his wrists–

But at his elbows, he's as pale as any northerner.

And he's thawing.

His fingers twitch a little, and in the time it takes Atem to gather rags to boil, Yugi scoots his way closer to the fireplace and manages to sit up half-way.

He’s reaching for fire, inching for it in every meaning of the word, sluggish even in his monstrous effort.

Atem fusses over him, takes his shoulders gently and helps him reach.

Yugi’s not even shivering, and where he’s pale he is tinted blue, and Atem nearly blenches when he’s yet again forced to come to terms with this because _this is death._

“You’re gonna be okay, yeah…?” Atem says and rubs rigid shoulders, feels the thawing sweater leave water on his palms.

Yugi makes a soft sound then, fainter than the cracks in the fireplace, and Atem realizes heat must be agony, or at least it will be when he feels it.

If the Witcher had it in him to speak before, now he does not.

“It’s okay,” Atem says and as good as accepts his demise as he takes off his own sweater. “It’s fine.”

Yugi’s hair is frozen solid, and everything happens so fast that one moment Atem is shedding their iced clothes, and the next his fingers are working the strings that lace his mask to the back of the Witcher’s head.

Violet glow dims when the mask falls away, along with long hairs, and there are familair colors in Yugi’s hair, and feathers stuck to the back of his head, and a face.

Atem knows this is a milestone.

Atem can't care, not now.

Not for his face, just for the little hissing whines his witch is making now.

He'll be screaming soon enough, Atem thinks.

He's down to Yugi’s undershirt now, thin and as frozen as the rest of his costume. Atem is dry in his shirt, but Yugi's is frozen to his skin, and the warm, damp rag Atem presses to him to thaw it off tears the first vicious hiss through Yugi’s teeth.

"Shh," Atem coos through hissing – through terror and gravity of what he’s doing - and works the warm rag all over pale arms and feet.

Yugi just sits absently, shies from the rag and Atem’s hands, reaches for the fire, and Atem is sure that he would find an aimless, void stare in his eyes if he had the bravery to look at the Witcher too closely.

It must blistering for Yugi, scalding. Atem remembers this, remembers agony, but all he can do is beg for his forgiveness and thaw him.

Yugi is as small of a thing as Atem suspected.

About his size, about his height.

Atem imagines him hatching through ribs and skins of strong gladiators and valiant heroes, through their giant bodies and muscles, covered in blood and guts, just to feast on their pain and horror.

The Witcher would do this - has done this - and now Atem knows how he managed to fit.

And Atem is here to witness this malignant man cry.

[[CRY]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/146097596360/i-couldnt-make-myself-finish-this-properly-im) (click)

Yugi’s face is angry pink now, wet with stubborn tears and spit, but he's not an old man or an ugly man or a beast. He looks so human - so _normal_ \- and that is far more terrifying than anything Atem had imagined.

He shakes stray thoughts out of his head.

Not now.

Drags the bedding by the corner until all blankets and quilts spill.

Makes a nest of them in ‘his place’ by the fire.

"Don't take this the wrong way," he says and feels his teeth chatter with dread. “I literally read this in a dirty novel, but I think it’s the right idea…?”

Yugi doesn't understand.

Just stares at the fire, and sits - dim and absent in the lampless goom of his hut.

That's not going to matter when Atem wakes up dead in the morning.

He unbuttons his shirt, takes a brave breath and pulls Yugi into an embrace from behind.

By the waist, skin against skin, and oh, oh he should not be doing this.

He tips them onto the rug, and he shouldn’t be doing this.

Wraps them both in furs, and he shouldn’t be doing this.

He should’ve put the Witcher into his bed, as is, and walked the fuck away from this.

He should not be doing this.

And the longer Yugi thaws, the more he begins to shiver and hiss - until he’s shaking so violently that he needs to get held the fuck down; and Atem is confronted by another reality: he has an arm across the Witcher’s chest, and his skin is brushing against tiny peaks.

His other hand is on Yugi’s thigh, and Yugi-

The Witcher-

No. _Yugi_ probably doesn’t like what’s happening to him.

None of it.

Not Atem touching him in any way, not the thawing, not his dirty thoughts.

Hell, he probably doesn’t like that Atem is helping him at all.

His scary witch is as much of a mess as Atem made of his life, his house, his feelings – and the Witcher’s feelings are a thing best kept at null. Yugi knows this, Yugi was this, until Atem came along and made him _like_ people and stories and stupid conversations about yarn crafts and baby feet in jars.

Atem learns what mercy means, now, on the floor of a house full of black magic, with one of the Seven Nightmares of the world leeching his body heat and making soft noises into his arm.  

Mercy would’ve been never giving these things to the the Witcher at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo so how was that
> 
> this was the very first scene i wrote for this fic and then scrapped it for 8 months oops


	17. unlucky seventeen

Atem wakes thinking it's his turn to put wood in the fire, but it's done, and he's confused why he's using a rug for a blanket, or why he doesn’t have hands.

 _He doesn’t have hands_.

He jolts and scrambles around so hard that his knees bruise against the hard floor, screams, looks for his hands - and they’re… there, and they tingle violently as blood rushes back into them.

He pants.

The rope they’re tied with really doesn’t help, and in his panic he tugs at it hard enough to earn himself rope burns next to blue bruises he knows he’ll find there if these ropes ever come off.

At least they’re not tied behind his back. If Atem couldn’t visually confirm that they’re still fucking attached, he’s not sure anything short of a slit throat would stop his screaming.

He tries to rub them together as he studies the house and decides what the fuck to do next.

The witch sits huddled in his usual chair.

He's managed to dry his things, even his mask, but he hides his fake face in his knees and rests until Atem approaches the table.

He perks up then, and stares.

Atem's plate has an extra egg.

Atem's face is burning.

 _You don't have to_ , he wants to say, but he shouldn't say even small things like that to someone who functions on deals and obligations. So instead Atem sits, blinks because his eyes have dried out, and cuts the extra egg in two the best he can with his hands tied up. Yugi left him mobile, so he knows he’s expected to do _something_.

So he is conscious of every standing hair on his body, and his face prickles with shame when he reaches across the table and slides the egg half to his huddled witch.

Yugi’s knees are all littered with black wires his mask has for hair.

He must've tried to brush it out.

Violet pinhole eyes flicker between the egg and Atem.

"What do you want?" Yugi's rusty voice asks, but it's as humble as the rest of him. "In return for what you did."

“Why this?” Atem holds up his arms.

“Couldn’t decide on the punishment. Check your neck.”

Atem doesn’t get it, but finds a fresh scab right under his ear, razor thin and razor straight, and-

Oh.

“Please don’t,” he mouths the best he can around his numb tongue. “I thought I was helping.”

“Yes. Realized that after I got _over_ finding your sticky fingerprints all over me.”

“...sorry.”

Yugi sighs.

“I would’ve regretted it as soon as I’ve done it,” he says like it’s supposed to be any consolation. “So, what do you want?”

He wants to not wake up for just long enough to realize his throat’s been slit.

He wants to not die here.

Somehow, he doesn’t think the Witcher would promise him that.

"What's it worth?" he checks stiffly.

The mask just _stares_.

"Not much."

Atem didn't save his life. What he found in the woods was repulsively Not Dead and would've stayed that way until it thawed. He knows that, and if his stomach wasn't burning a hole in him he just might be too sick to eat his food.

But the witch feels things - Yugi feels things - and when he says his agony isn't worth much, he means it.

_Bang!_

It thunders, rattles the dishes, knocks a mug over.

Atem jolts half-way out of his skin.  

“Tell me,” Yugi sethes and curls his fist like he means to slam it into Atem’s face this time, “what the hell you want. _Now_.”

When Atem last saw him, all of him, the Witcher wasn’t a large man. Not a burly man, not an ugly man - but now, in his anger and in his mask, he is at his ugliest, his thorniest.

If his body would unclench for even a moment and his arms wouldn’t melt before they ever reached this witch, Atem is sure his hands would come away bloody just from touching him because now his Yugi is sharper than the icy breath of winter.

Atem still feels him, soft thighs ghosting just beneath his fingertips, smooth and warm after their bodies harmonized their shared heat.

He still feels his hot breath bouncing off the back of Yugi’s delicate neck, his lips tingle where they brushed salt skin and little hairs.

“How _dare_ you.”

Can he hear Atem’s mind? Can he feel what Atem feels, deep in his belly under sheets and sheets of ice and terror, stirring.

“Sorry,” Atem says, barely manages to get breath into his words, wants something he can’t have and wants to live more. “I’m sorry. It’s not like that. I want… I don’t know. Stories, or s-something?” his words begin to slur and he stutters, squints. “Where did you come from...? Who gave you magic? Why are you… I don’t… I’m s-sorry. So sorry. Don’t… please don’t..?”

He reels into the the back of his chair, screws his eyes shut because walls can’t collapse if he doesn’t see them, forgets to breathe.

A thin noise escapes his throat.

Fingernails pierce his palms.

He dares to crack an eye when his death isn’t punctual.

Sees the Witcher looming over him, with his knee braced on the table, reaching for Atem, his hand just inches from Atem’s throat-

No, his _mouth_ , bent like a claw that wants his tongue, his teeth. 

And Yugi’s fingers are curling with indecision.

Atem promptly shuts his eye.

 _Nope_.

This is the most blood-curdling that he’d seen the Witcher, a wild blot of blackened terror crawling at him over furniture just when Atem thought he escaped its interest, but there it is again, licking his tracks and tugging at his hair, his clothes, shaking cups and scraping invisible talons against the wood. Towering, snaring, feral down to the last hair.

“I’ll be good, I’ll be good,” Atem begs.

He hears Yugi hiss, then shuffling, then boots on the table.

Dares a peak - and Yugi made it the entire way across, shrugged out of his rat skins. Got ready to sit.

It’s okay to stare at his boots, at least, at their rich butter leather and silver buckles. They’re the nicest thing Yugi owns.

Atem watches them all the way down until they settle, dangling off the table right next to him.

“That’s not what you _want_.”

“I want to go home,” he mumbles, slurs. “You don’t owe me magic. You would’ve brought yourself home if it was worth that. Other than that, I don’t really… a story? A… book?”

The Witcher has nothing to give him. This is painfully clear, and Atem feels humiliation prickling down his spine, almost as cold as his fear. Yugi didn't have to give him his food and his shelter, and now Atem is in a position to ask for _more_ of it, _again_ , and if Yugi's comfort is truly worth so little then it would be fair - and it shouldn't be fair - but it is.

Atem isn’t even sure he _wants_ comfort. He remembers him clinging to his arm in his sleep, remembers his shallow breaths, how the arches of his feet liked to rub against Atem’s toes.

“But you don’t want a damn story.”

Atem tries to shrug, shudders.

“Tsk,” the Witcher says, flat, and yanks at his bound hands indifferently. “Thought I finally had a plan for you.”

“Was it as bad as it sounds.”

“Mm,” is his absent answer.

The buckles on Yugi’s boots are shiny, too shiny. Atem remembers these boots resting empty at his eye level, once, when sleep wouldn’t take him. They were dull then, muddled by scum and age.

Yugi cleaned them.

Long hairs settle on Yugi’s boots, strings fall on the sides of his knees. There’s an unmistakable sound of nails against wood.

Here it is, finally.

The unmasking.

All proper, with the lights on and without any matters more pressing than this moment.

Atem expected to wake up strung up by his veins for stripping the witch naked and lulling him to sleep in his arms.

He still isn’t sure that fate won’t find him if he dares to look anywhere but Yugi’s boots - but he’s stupid - and so he does.

Men died to this face.

Atem will never know the number, but he knows many men died not to the Witcher’s magic or wishes, but to a face that promised them safety and care, made them feel welcome, secure, _wanted_.

Atem digs his nails into his palms until they’re full of skin and dirt, and hurt enough to banish thoughts he knows Yugi doesn’t _like_.

Yugi was a beauty once, a long time ago when his eyes didn't glow violet and his hands weren't blackened with evil deeds.

It’s hard to see him as anything but that, and just knowing who he is and what he does uglies him, makes him dirty and unattractive. But his face has a sweet curve to it, and his lips, cracked and bitten, are shaped like a healthy heart.

Atem just wishes for a bit of pink in them, a little moisture.

Yugi narrows his eyes at that, scowls, gorgeous and lethal.

Yugi _is_ a beauty - and at the same time he very surely isn’t. It’s difficult to understand - so perhaps it’s a charm.

If anything, he is tired. Tired, kind of greasy, with flaky skin and crusted eyes.

He wipes them, blinks into focus.

Fast, then slow and glossy-eyed, brushes his cheeks with his long lashes, _aaand_ Atem stops caring if it’s a charm or not.

The Witcher rolls his eyes, stares down at Atem, and his lip twitches in disgust.

A phantom twitch goes down Atem's leg, along the work this witch did on it, down every careful line and all the violet magic stored in it.  

He ignores it; can't be more important than this.  

"You look like this" Atem says, because he's a stupid southern princeling who can't hold his tongue to save his skin, “...always?”

His eyes are violet, and even on its own that’s not a natural color. Atem had a bit of trouble over his red eyes and patchy hair colors, but he is a prince and his deformities aren’t unheard of.

But _this_.

One look at this, and anyone would know it for dark magic and witchery.

To his rude question, Yugi nods.

“Is it a glamour charm?”

He shakes his head, annoyed, evasive.

“I thought... I don’t know. There’s no way you don’t know what I mean. But you’re _people_ , so...”

Nothing.

No words from someone who never shied from making conversation, idle _or_ threatening.

“Can you talk?”

Yugi purses his lips and rolls his eyes at him again - makes Atem swallow hard and press into the back of his chair even firmer.

Then sort of shrugs, like, ‘ _here you go, you asked for it.'_

_And_

_then_

_he_

_speaks._

“Stupid,” the Witcher says.

Atem thinks - at first - that there’s tar behind white teeth, black and shiny and viscous.

Then his tiny fangs catch light, and then the mouth that holds them. The Witcher sort of unravels then, says something, leans in so that Atem can see better, once again big, once again larger than his miserable hut and everything in it.

Walls close around Atem, and he's falling. His stupid curiosity freezes to his lips and tries to run-- but instead he's falling through the hole in his stomach.

Falling backwards.

When jittery aftershocks melt through his dread, he's on the floor, and he knocked the chair over on the way down.

He dares a glance Yugi's way, and sees that he's considering fastening that dreadful mask back over his face.

 _Good_.

[[HELLMOUTH]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/146004952775/witcher-yugi-with-his-black-hands-and-hellmouth) (click)

“Sorry!” Atem lies, and instead wants to say Yugi should stitch it to his filthy face permanently. “Just... didn’t expect that.”

The witch, for all his vices, knows exactly what he is, and, in a strange and charming sort of way, he’s conscious about it.

It’s in the way he pulls his sleeves over his knuckles when Atem stares at his tar hands a bit too long, or the way he hides them between his knees when he’s reading.

Sometimes, Atem thinks, the Witcher himself is too ashamed to look at his own hands and remember the things he did to deserve them.

So when Atem tells him he’s sorry, he must know that he’s not sorry.

It's a lie.

But it's a lie he likes. He peers, taps the wood against his chin, and stares down at Atem with eyes uncannily susceptible to such kindness.

He lets it drop then - his mask - reluctantly, and after debating it for a long moment.

“Ugh,” he says with his ugly charcoal mouth. “Whatever, you’re terrified well enough,” - he licks his lips for effect, and even his tongue is black. “Had me worried you wouldn’t know what it means, like with hands. Close enough, I guess. I’ve been wearing that thing for a month, my face hurts.”

Atem winces. He can’t stand to look at that mouth, so he looks at the floor.

Can’t stand.

“You can’t stand up on that leg again, can you?”

“Probably can, but...”

Yugi smacks his lips together, less angry and suddenly a little fascinated. Scrapes his nails against the table, idly clicks his dangling heels.

“It’s so _annoying_ ,” he says, almost laughs, grinds a challenge between his teeth.  

Atem glares up at him through his bangs - at his lips instead of his eyes - and thinks the idea of kissing _that_ is repulsive, and he could've left this monster in the snow. This thought is far more foul than anything this witch could ever be. He shakes it, remembers who he is.

Remembers that if his leg amuses this witch, then he might live to see another day.

“I can move it,” Atem mutters. “Just can’t feel it at all.”

“I have to think about this,” Yugi says and hops off the table, and Atem follows him with his eyes as he goes to rummage through one of the chests he has under his bed.

“I’ve got chores...”

“And I have an unhex charm,” he holds out his black palm, traces a line down his middle finger. “Light tattoo, right here. One snap,” - he almost snaps his fingers - “and it’s done. But…? Oh, _‘but what’_ Atem, work with me.”

“...but you won’t waste magic.”

“Not even a drop,” he says and drops a wide, gold bracelet like he’d give scraps from his table to a dog. “Carry that for me, my pockets are full.”

Atem understands, so he wears it awkwardly over the _fucking_ rope that still binds his _fucking_ hands.

“With your foot, stupid. I’ll think of something, I always do. Before I kill you, I hope. Or before someone comes for you. Go do your chores.”   

“What do you mean?”

Yugi yawns, bored - and _oh gods_ that _mouth_ , that is just…

No.

He pretends to be busy with the anklet, pretends to hide his disgust.

The Witcher cares for dirt under his boot more than he cares for Atem’s discomfort.

“Your father’s raising an army. Threatens war if the rail lords don't come get you. They’re trying to pretend they’re poor, I've been ignoring their calls for a week. Rude.”

Atem reels at this, hisses his breath out of his lungs and jumps to his two now healthy feet.

"Doesn't he know I'm safe!?"

"You're never safe, not with me."

"Someday, I'd like to be," Atem seethes through his teeth.

Yugi's heart lips curl up, and Atem forgets for a moment what's behind them.

He giggles, amused.

It's like bells on a carriage horse, and his wicked eyes are the friendliest Atem had seen since he crossed the border.

“Cute. _Chores_. Not going to untie you, no. Still don’t like what you did.”

"You're not supposed to be alone," Atem tells him. "It's what ruined you."


	18. eighteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YO GUYS 
> 
> check out this gorgeous [fanart by yu-gi-ow](http://yu-gi-ow.tumblr.com/post/146034556407/when-your-unexpected-guest-keeps-being-stupid) (kura). <3 <3

Not one railroad corporation would let a southern army enter the North.

Not one rail lord would be stupid enough to try and rob the Witcher of his toy.

Not that they'd want to - they want expansion rights, and the cost of lives for hire in a short war might well be worth it to them.  

And so, Yugi tells him, the negotiations are about to break down, all because of a single damsel in distress and a cousin who misses his mouth.

Fucking _rude_.

“Well,” Yugi tells him a few quiet evenings later, and it’s still so strange seeing a face on him, so foreign. Atem appreciates the back of his head more. He can’t see his hideous mouth then, and remember that _it_ had kissed his forehead. “Might as well tell you. There isn’t a single gypsy, nomad or wanderer that isn’t trying to hex you and everything you love. Somehow, you managed to piss off every single one of them. It’s why your foot keeps failing, too.”

Atem takes the anklet off just once, and finds that his foot is numb and sizzling inside.

It’s like he cut it open and stuffed it with mint.

But there's no injury, not even a scratch on it. His large, architectural tattoo takes care of that, with its levels upon levels of runes, like the circles of hell, except more of them. And branches of rays, some just lines and some intricate collapsed writing - Atem can almost feel them sometimes, like they're threads sown underneath his skin.

It will never break, never take damage. If Atem plunges it into acid, he will feel every burn and blister until it would naturally heal (if ever), except the foot will remain. Even in his grave it will stay intact as his body rots away. Yugi strongly suggests Atem puts it in his will to cut it off after his death, else his soul might be trapped by it forever.

Everlasting.

There are mages in their graves, Yugi tells him, centuries dead, and their souls are very awake in their everlasting prisons.

“There are very few things in this world that can’t be undone,” he says. “This is one of them.”

His hellmouth captivates Atem, hypnotizes him with its venom every time he looks at it. Yugi’s pearly teeth are ghastly against the charcoal backdrop, but they’re just teeth, if not a little bit pointy and fang-like. It’s what’s behind them that’s completely fucked up.

“What about your black parts?” he asks without an ounce of manners left in him.

“That's another.”

When his leg doesn't improve, the Witcher makes him sit cross legged on the bed, facing him, sits across from him with his legs crossed, too, and stares at it, says he can jinx by staring murder sometimes though it's probably not a real science, and then he stares and stares and _stares_.

“I’m thinking,” he says when the starting sends Atem into a mild fit. "There's always a way."

He doesn’t have to. His debt is long done; in fact, Atem suspects he didn’t have to repair it the second time at all. But as long as neither of them admits to it...

Yugi wants to help his leg. In a rigid, obsessive kind of way, but he means kindness by it, and Atem takes it as kindness because Yugi doesn’t get to be kind to anyone.

In the absence of things to do, he reaches out and takes a black hand into his own.

They both freeze, and, for a chilling moment, he thinks he fucked up because he didn’t give Yugi anything.

But when his world doesn't end, he is stuck awkwardly holding the Witcher by the hand and so he kind of wishes it did end after all.

So he pretends blood didn’t rush into his face - and maybe gets away with it because all northerners are blind and believe no one in the South can blush - and scoots closer.

Handles Yugi’s hand with both of his, inspects the nails. They aren’t paler underneath the matte crust, not like normal nails, and so he compares, presses their palms together, their fingertips.

“Did the black start on your fingers and then spread?” he asks. “The more shit you did?”

“Yes.”

Atem looks up, and Yugi is wide-eyed and cautious - sweet, always deceptively sweet - but it’s easier to tell from his face how much he hates contact but craves it.

“Should’ve fucked that lady a bit faster, before I got a chance to kill her.”

Yugi only cares to watch where their hands are touching.

“Transactions are done after they're done. I like them better than this. I don't like what you want,” he says, but stays exactly where he is with his eyes shut. Even grins a little. "...ah, I have a summons, I should go. Mm. It’s a good one.”

He savors the moment, and then looks right into Atem’s eyes, all piercing and insistent, and pins him to the spot.

His black fingers slip between Atem’s and hold on, and suddenly it’s like they’re holding hands in a real way.

“Don’t give me this,” the Witcher says quickly, quietly, and squeezes his hand. “It’s cruel.”

What a miserable existence.

“Live a little,” Atem tells him and takes his other hand. “What happened to you in the snow was cruel. This, you like.”

If he closes his eyes, the hands he’s holding are just Yugi’s hands, Yugi the boy who came to his court from another world and charmed him away with his stories and magic.

Atem feels safe for a moment too long, and in hindsight, with a hand ripping at his hair, he’d prefer to die pretending he’s safe, and not to what he feels now.

“Hah,” Yugi jerks at his mane and leans in just close enough to snap his laughing jaws into Atem’s face, watch the soul drain out of him. “You think I like this. Like. Haha,” he throws his head to the skies and laughs, mad and with more life in him that Atem had ever seen. “You damn _child.”_

He’s in a habit of standing on furniture, and so when he leaves the bed to Atem he leaps, suddenly a blizzard of violets and giddy excitement, lands right into his boots.

“ _Like_ ,” he keeps cackling. Atem takes the time to promptly slam himself into the headboard to wait out this storm. “Weeks, and you still don’t know what I like.”

He throws his rat skins over himself, tries to snatch Atem’s arm - and there’s no going anywhere when you’re a fish in a barrel - drags him away by the scruff of his neck, throws a quilt his way.

Grabs the arm, finally, hard enough to mark him more violet than his eyes.

“I’ll show you,” he whispers. It’s the Witcher’s whisper, not Yugi’s. It carries into his ear and only adds to a firework of undefined sensations Atem won’t live long enough to process.

But he can process the cold.

Snow biting through his socks, and shades of blue, blue everything, blue further away than the entire world.

And, it’s so much quieter than the Witcher’s clearing that Atem thinks his eardrums got punctured in the moment it took Yugi to drag him to this glass fortress.

Water, with sheep sailing its waves.

It’s water he sees, and if the Blue Eyes were born of nature, it must’ve been here.

Looks down - and feels how small of a speck he is on the very edge of this glacier, and how little his life will ever mean.

He clings to Yugi with both hands now, and barely manages to keep his quilt falling into the blue abyss.

But the Witcher - he just yanks Atem around like he’s been dwarfed by the wrong thing all along.

Atem turns, and-

_Runes._

Vast, engraved into cliffs and drops like snow and ice are just paper, painted in blood and soot. Packed densely with components, and still teen feet tall, smaller, larger - perspective is difficult.

And on the flat ice, alchemy fields, glyphs. Hell, they’re even standing at an edge of one with a tree in its center, hammered into the ice upside-down and blooming severed goat heads in its roots.

Even Atem can tell the incohesion.

Lettering that can’t belong to one language or one era, glyphs from parts of the world that should never meet, all woven together in a part-black and part-forbidden cacophony.

“On big clear paper,” Yugi whispers love into his ear, and Atem remembers that these are his own words. “To see if you fucked up.”

Atem wants to ask for the world, but his lips are frozen shut.

Yugi coils his arm around his and rests against him, wicked grin just a soft smile now.

“No one wants to be among the stars anymore, or to marry Fate, or summon gods. Just money, mostly.”

Atem finally licks out of his mouth, tastes blood.

Can’t think of a thing to say.

Snow is wood floors, cliffs are jars.

Temperature fuckery makes him burn and shiver, drops him down onto Yugi’s bed where he sits and stares dumbly at that baby foot.

And the fucking Witcher just casually strolls to pour himself some tea for the road.

“Money,” he traces his palm like there’s an invisible tattoo there, and rolls his eyes. Rolles them again, his mood swinging further from his chilling mirth the more he looks Atem’s way. “ _Live a little. This, you like._ Please, Atem, don’t tempt me. You’ve developed a sense of security.”   

He struts Atem’s way, sits on the edge of his bed like he never left it. Atem’s mind is lagging so far behind that he's seeing phantom blue skies on their ceiling.

But the Witcher wants his answer.

“N-no?”

“Mm,” Yugi says and leers lazily, flashes a little fang, leans back on his elbows. “Don’t lie to me.”

Ah, _shit._

“I thought,” Atem’s eyes prickle as they thaw, “we had... a moment. That night, and just now.”

“And?"

Atem’s mouth tastes like cotton. He says nothing.

“Did the Magicians not tell you your value? Not in gold, boy. In parts.”

He crawls to Atem, and there’s something sharp in his glowing eyes, greedy. He’s a black creature with ghastly skin, a bottomless hole for a mouth, a predator with lips so gorgeous Atem might as well let himself be consumed just to feel them against his skin.

It’s a charm. A spell, a potion. Dog training. There’s no escaping soot hands pulling his quilt from him, soot mouth coming so close to him that another quick snap of teeth, and the Witcher might rip his face right off.

But he likes to hear his witch purr, even if it’s a growl.  

“A prince, in magic alone. Mm. I’d take you apart, pick you down to every bone. And even coming home alive. You don’t need your legs, or hands. Eyes, your pretty eyes. What are you gonna do, scream, beg? I’d take your tongue first.”

His depraved face is just inches from Atem’s face, and the Witcher’s breath is soft, yearning.

He thumbs over Atem’s lips, smears spit on his fingers. Traces them like a lover in throes of passion, wants his tongue for a spell.

But, what if instead, he just wants to kiss Atem?

Atem’s stomach bottoms out at just the idea of it, at the idea of that filthy mouth dripping dirt into his.

But a thrill shoots down his spine, pricks him in all the wrong (right) places (and he knows he’s going insane).

“If it comes to it,” Yugi murmurs, and his venom breath is honey, and his tar mouth is licorish, and Atem wants as much fears, “bite your tongue, or slit your throat. Don’t make yourself live through it, it’s an awful way to go.”

“I think I love you,” Atem tells him, numb.

“Stupid,” the Witcher whispers softly, and Atem's blood freezes solid at his tenderness. "You're wrong."

Atem thinks about it long after Yugi takes off and leaves behind a ruby the size of an egg as good summons. He thinks about it as he dims the lamps for the night, as he puts a screen over their fireplace.

He sits against the wall in his furs, in his place, with his cheek nestled into a soft rabbit pelt, and thinks about it.

It’s in the wee hours of the morning that footsteps wake him - of a burglar, or perhaps a thief. He cracks an eye open and sees the Witcher, ratskins and mask and wickedness.

Sees him step lightly, touch nothing, slip outside, quieter than the dead.

So like an idiot, Atem follows him, huddled in furs and with his boots unlaced.

The door handle is sticky, and when he checks his hand, he sees that it’s blood.

Dawn in the North is blue - rich blue and crisper than a shirt starched on a cold day - and the air is just the right mix of glass and mint and freshness. It’s still and barren, and odd trees litter the horizon like hands reaching to a lifeless sun for warmth it would never give them.

Yugi is kneeling in the snow, scrubbing his hands with what Atem knows feels like glass and barbs, and even in the twilight he can tell that he’s painting the snow crimson.

“Are you hurt?” Atem says and leans sleepily against the door frame.

“It’s not mine,” Yugi tells him with a strange lisp. “A spell. Go inside.”

“...are you okay?” is Atem’s next question, because he remembers just what sort of things would make a man wash his hands with needles and broken glass.

Yugi doesn’t answer him for a while, just scrubs his hands. His mask lays discarded next to him, so when he scoops the snow Atem can tell he’s trying to clean his face.

It must be a while since anyone asked the Witcher if he was okay.

“...no,” he says, still lisping.

Atem braves the cold then, knows his furs would be damp if he should try to sleep in them, feels cold slip into his untied boots.

Goes around the Witcher, keeps his distance, sees his face.

Blood is hard to see on his blackened hands, but around his black mouth it’s like a grievous wound, horrible and gory.

Atem suspects Necromancy right away, and when the Witcher clamps his mouth shut and walks far enough from the path to vomit, he knows he’s right when he sees blood and meat and little guts in the snow.

Atem feels his dinner coming up, too.

He swallows it down and lets the fresh air push bile and snot back where it belongs.

“Did you really eat something alive until it died,” he says when he trusts himself to speak, remembers glyphs lovingly carved into glaciers.

“That’s how it’s done,” Yugi wipes bloody sludge from his mouth and tries to eat snow again.

“It’s _not_ done.”

“I’d prefer that, too.”

He waits out another blench and stands there until his witch decides to come back inside. Takes his rat coat, thinks about how he’ll clean the blood later.

“You thought it was a good one. Wasn’t a good one at all, was it?”

“No,” Yugi agrees and makes tea. "But someone always make a deal for it, one way or another."


	19. nineteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YO LOOK AT THE ARTS!!! <3 <3
> 
> 1, [Ectology's chapter 16](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/146097596360/i-couldnt-make-myself-finish-this-properly-im) ~BIG REVEAL~ art  
> 2: [kydalyn's hilarious ](http://kudalyn.tumblr.com/post/146096654883)nugget #crying  
> 3! [yu-gi-ow's sexy gore](http://yu-gi-ow.tumblr.com/post/146071413067/welp-i-dont-think-ill-ever-finish-this-so-here) tw: gore and tw: sexy

 

The Witcher lies.

He is a scorned creature, older than dirt and just about as rotten as he is fruitful. Uglier than sin but sin on his own - there to make nightmares out of wishes and pick a desperate man down to his bone as payment.

Not a mage or a wizard, but a witch - born out of need for things to mar in this world with magic stolen or traded or bought.

Atem remembers every word of every story, recites them in his mind before he sleeps: about ugliness and broken promises and grudges and ill will.

And the one thing he forgets is the first three words.

_The Witcher lies._

But he doesn’t – not really. He answers every query truthfully or not at all, never takes effort to disguise what he is, never makes promises of safety he’s bound to break, and never fails to remind Atem about the harsh reality of his stay here.

The Witcher _doesn’t_ lie, not in Atem’s experience. 

In hindsight, Atem can’t blame himself when he realizes what he’s done to the beat of rain drumming against rooftops and sending rivulets running down his face.

He doesn’t know it yet: the Witcher lies.

But for now, the Witcher’s hut is warm, and heat creeps up his cheeks whenever he thinks about Yugi too much.

“Have you ever… died?” he asks after a particularly nasty tantrum that leaves Yugi a little more winded and bothered, which he solves by strapping himself back into his mask and boiling a squirrel head until its skull comes away clean and shiny.

He thinks it makes a great ornament for his cloak, makes Atem stitch it on like a button with eye sockets for holes while he makes a tiny hex bag to stuff it with.

It’s a question Atem thinks the Witcher forgets for a few good hours. They shovel snow into tubs and cauldrons, melt it for water, and then do it again and again until the yard is walkable and their water supply is good for the week.

Atem too forgets about it - but then the weather goes to shit and it’s quiet time by the fireplace, a time the Witcher likes to take to leaf through ancient books and drape Atem’s quilt over his legs because it’s closest and he can’t be bothered to go get his own.

Which is fine. Atem leans against the woven reeds of Yugi’s chair legs, steals the length of furs that’s quite possibly there to be stolen, sits on the floor, listens to wind howling, and fiddles with things.

Books, occasionally, that Yugi discards in Atem’s general direction.

This one has words – in a language Atem can’t read – and glyphs, and drawings of pyres with people burning.

They’re not witches. But they burn in hesitant brush strokes, and Atem remembers why he asked at all.

“I mean, died, crossed over, and returned?”

Yugi tilts his mask at him – times it nicely with nasty howl – and makes Atem slam the book shut on reflex and lose his page.

“Much easier question. No, never crossed.”

“Is there something to cross?”

“Dunno. For gods there is.”

“So you died, then?”

He falls silent again, bored or perhaps stumped, goes back to his books about burning people. He has a deal on the table, he told Atem, from a father who wants to die to save his daughters from consumption. The Witcher offered him that _and_ wealth if the man lets himself be burned.

Another awful way to go, all for a ritual, and Yugi can’t even decide which one.

But it spawns Atem’s questions, and with them, a tantrum, and the mask’s sore return.

“I heard that you ripped out your arm once, when a Chaos magician caught you in a trap.”

Yugi snorts – probably into his mask – because he takes it off and wipes the inside.

“That drunk,” is all he says on the matter, probably too annoyed to talk over the wind.

That was a century ago.

Atem tries another way.

“You ever fucked them up? Those spells in your ice field that you mashed out of stuff you shouldn’t combine.”

Of course he did. Oh, Atem means that kind of death. Sure, many times.

How casual of him, maybe that’s why he doesn’t understand what he says when he threatens Atem with it.

“No. It’s so that you would make a deal and get out of my house. Why won’t you just _leave_.”

“How considerate of you,” Atem mutters and mushes his cheek into an armrest so he doesn’t have to look into Yugi’s gross mouth when he speaks. Gets an absent pat on the head for it – sees that it’s the Witcher’s knee. Doesn’t really care, lets the wailing wind soothe him.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Yugi smacks his book shut, throws the quilt over Atem’s head and leaves him blinking dust out of his eyes as he digs deep under his bed. 

“Are you doing something,” says Atem.

“You’ll be doing something,” says the Witcher.

“Awoo,” says the wind.

Yugi emerges only to ball his fists and set his jaw. Dives back with vigour.

“It’s your fault,” he hisses and makes Atem think he should begin to worry. “You made me care for things, for sounds.”

“Is that a wolf?” he says. “Is that a rifle!?”

Yugi drops it heavy onto the table, barrel facing Atem’s way, and this is not at all the death Atem imagined.

“I thought they were muskets,” Yugi gives it a sour stare, then turns his displeasure to Atem. “You know things. Come here.”

They’re both right. It’s a rifled musket, encased in faded wood, older than anything Atem has ever used. He’s seen it on a wall though, a relic if it wasn’t immeasurably valuable for what it can do.  

Yugi has a crate of them under the snow somewhere, apparently, a payment for a something or other a decade before the Disarmament, and he trades them for farms and fisheries he lets waste away - which is still cheaper than buying the rare one that may spring up on a black auction every year or so.

Atem wonders if he will be ‘something or other’ too, when the little deals he makes here are as old as this damn gun.

“Bring me that wolf,” Yugi frowns and waves at Atem with a dismissive hand.

“You’re sending me to die,” Atem stares into the back of his head, not entirely convinced there’s a wolf out there at all.

“By all means.”

 _Fuck,_ he thinks and bets one of his very few bargaining chips.

“How about I teach you to shoot, and if we see a wolf, I’ll do my best.”

The Witcher knows how to shoot it – which is just barely true according to what Atem hears from him – it’s the cleaning that blew his face off the only time he tried it.

[[NOT LIKE THAT]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/146129815220/kudalyn-ectology-i-cant-believe-yugi-is) (click)

“I’ll teach you that, too.”

And so gunshots crack thunder through the clearing, spook the few birds stupid enough to live in this wasteland, and echo on forever.

It’s snowing – but Yugi’s right, there is no wind to howl - except no smart wolf would stick around two small men with a murderous thunderstick, so fire logs thirty feet away are their targets. And also birds, and Atem stops wasting bullets on them pretty quickly.

The Witcher’s aim is shit.

It isn’t until Atem corrects his hold that he realizes Yugi’s concept of aiming a firearm is very vague at best.

He has charm runes under his fingernails, he tells him, that bless every spell he throws with perfect aim. 

“Wasn’t ever good at it,” he says into his scarf after he misses each of his shots. “And I don’t like these things.”

Gunpowder smoke pinches Atem’s eyes worse than the frost.

“Good thing all of them got melted. You should get rid of yours, too. It’s bad.”

Yugi drops a bullet down the barrel an arm length away from his gunshot-prone self, aims for a log – then turns on the spot and prods Atem’s chest with the muzzle.

Unprovoked, out of nowhere.

Atem has so little time to react that he sort of doesn’t; just stands there with a gun to his chest, and Yugi’s stare is so absent that he might as well shoot him as a chore he just remembered.

And then he shoots a log.

Misses.

Groans.  

“Enough of this already. _Time to go_ ,” he decides, flicks Atem in the forehead with his black fingers – why did he take his glove off? – and makes sparks rain in Atem’s eyes.

Of shock, probably.  

He pats himself down, looks for the bullet and a hole and blood, and gets lobbed in the head for it.

With snow.

Raises his head, gets scolded with a face-full of it.

Six feet away from him, the Witcher is laughing with that nasty mouth of his, wide and toothy and much better suited for laughter of a sweet boy than the _Witcher’s_ cackle of all things.

How ridiculous is it, really, that of all ugly things the Witcher could’ve been, he has to have Yugi’s cute face.

Atem shakes his head. Of course he would, he’s the Witcher, what the _hell_.

But he’s laughing and throwing snowballs at him with his shit aim, and hell, Atem’s aim is both better and harder, and soon that creepy rat cloak is powdered with sugar, and the black feathers spout patchy white dawn.

They build a snowman – probably, Atem can’t really remember - but soon enough the warmth of their home welcomes them.

Yugi’s cheeks are rosy and full, his lips cherry red, his eyes spring violets.

They tumble to the floor, and Atem catches him around his waist just before Yugi smashes his chest into bits and his heart along with it. It’s an enchanted moment, and they both hold their breaths as Atem eases Yugi down.

Black-clad knees cage around his leg, heart lips start true words they can’t finish.

Yugi’s weight is grounding, candid, and Atem finds blissful imprisonment in his soft lilac eyes.

“I thought you didn’t like this,” he whispers.

“I lied,” Yugi whispers back, like Atem lured the words right out of him, then blinks away the enchantment - and at once his witch is a shy and startled bird.

In his panic, he rolls off.

Not far; the promise of things he wanted all along trap him.

He comes to rest on Atem’s arm, even lets Atem reel him in by the waist.

They lie on the floor like lovers stargazing on a soft summer night, and Atem is sure they’re both tracking the same shooting star when a fat cockroach shoots across the ceiling. Their wishes match.

“It’s okay,” Atem shushes him. “It’s okay to want things like this. You’re still human.”

“Doing kind things makes me human, and I’ve… I’ve… Atem, I’m sorry.”

“I know, love. It’s fine.”

His love sniffles, and his pretty face scrunches pitifully, like he trapped an unforgivable secret behind his teeth.

“What is it?”

Yugi purrs and nests into his arm like it’s a honey trap, turns half-way and captures Atem’s eyes with a sultry gaze that fits his sweet face much better than any scowl.

It’s warm, enticing.

Helpless.

Yearning, searching Atem’s soul for pity and help.

“I kept things from you. I’m sorry,” he says and withdraws his affections.

Sits up, means to leave Atem.

“I’ll forgive you anything,” Atem swears, desperate to keep him his. “Just tell me.”

Yugi’s heart lips tremble, and his eyes pierce through every uncertainty Atem ever had about this man - shatter his defences with unquestionable honesty until all that’s left is Atem’s trust.

 “I caused a war, between your father and the North. It will be so bloody,” his sweet witch looks at his black palms in disgust, “and it will be on my hands.”

“That’s-“

“No, Atem. That’s my fault,” Yugi murmurs and leaves Atem lonely and cold, “because I can’t bring you home without a deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fukin idiot rip


	20. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHAPTER WARNING: T-rated adult content, kinda vague but y'all have dirty minds, so...

Atem makes the deal.

Not because Yugi laughed him out of the house (literally) and then spent the week cackling nastily at his every word - but because he can't have war with the North.

Not because _‘but you’ll forgive me anything, right?’_ became a punchline to the Witcher’s daily torments and quickly became too cruel of a joke - but because he can’t have war with the North.

Atem makes the deal during the fiercest storm he’s seen, one that rattles Yugi’s little hut and rips the door right off its hinges. They prop it shut with a dresser and stuff rags to keep the draft out, but it only stops the ice at their doorstep and not the cold.

Atem makes the deal and cries - really cries, cries into the Witcher’s knee and takes what little comfort Yugi’s hands care to offer him.

He’s civil on Atem’s last night at his house, suspiciously civil.

It’s like he’s waiting to see which way the wind blows before he scares it stupid enough to not blow at all. He’s waiting for Atem to do something stupid, or to figure out something big.

He’s waiting, but Atem only cares for the kingdom he half-sold.

“Who can even afford that?” he asks absently and lets Yugi work his hair into helpless knots.

“Your fiance’s father wanted to annex those lands for years. He’ll pay.”

“Hah. I’ll be the one whose reign brakes South in two. Still. Better than war,” he says just to convince himself. “Right..?”

“Right,” Yugi mutters airly and swats at his head with his book. “Sure, better. Go away now.”

“Won’t you miss me?” Atem drones into his knee. “Hey, penny for your thoughts, please.”

“You don’t have a penny.”

Atem produces one from his pocket, dull and crusted green.

“Found it cleaning between the floorboards, been saving it. I want…” he threads his penny between his fingers. “Hmm. You’ll miss me, right? You said you wanted me to stay forever.”

Yugi takes his penny before he answers - takes his eyes off the pages and finally indulges Atem’s needy goodbyes.

“You would’ve never made it ‘till spring,” he says and catches Atem’s wandering gaze easily - and it’s hard to not be caught when it’s the Witcher’s glowing eyes that pin him. “You’re too difficult, you make everything too difficult.”

“But I’ve been so good,” Atem says and punctuates that he spent two months at the mercy of Yugi’s feet by fixing a buckle on his boot.

The Witcher laughs, and it’s like a rusted windchime - hollow and eerily off-key, but still homely in it’s own way.

“Still would’ve made a necklace out of your fingers,” he says like it’s the most natural thing in the world. ”You hurt me. I’ll feel this pain centuries after you die.”

Yugi’s wearing his best pants, and Atem clings to them in case he still wants that necklace.

His witch smells faintly of lavender today, and even his shirt is clean.

It Atem didn’t know better, he’d think he dressed up for him.

“I was thinking if I should say I’ll miss you or not. I don’t think I will.”

“Of course not, stupid. You’re not in love,” Yugi reminds him, and it’s one of the gentlest ways he’s ever done it. It’s such an absurd thing to hear from the Witcher of all people, but Atem is used to it now, after hearing it day after day and knowing that Yugi is not wrong. “You’ll be home soon, and then you’ll realize what you really missed. Your country, your father. Sand between your toes. Your cousin’s prick.”

Atem snorts.

Half a country, anyway.

He stays awake for hours, feels his eyeballs crust over from stalking a cockroach along the wall. It’s a murky one, onion peel wings and needle legs, the kind that would leap into the face of anyone who tries to stomp it out.

He saw Yugi munch one between his teeth when he thought Atem wasn’t looking.

Just picked the roach out of the wall with his dirt fingers and ate it live. A chunk with legs still twitched half-way out of that pretty mouth, until a black tongue slurped it up and smacked moist lips around it.  

Atem won’t ever see that again.

This roach won’t have the same fate. Atem’s open palm smears it along the wall, wipes its chunky shell and curdy innards under the cupboard, and no more tasty bugs in the Witcher’s orifices.

He sighs.

Sleep won’t take him, not on his first night here, nor his last, or any stormy nights in-between when drafts licked the back of his neck and the winds moaned a broken lament to his sanity.

He’s had enough of this dusty floor, he thinks, and its boards creaking under him whenever he as much as dares to think about turning.

He’s had enough of _daring_ , of having to be _brave_ , of thinking three times before speaking his mind.

It’ll be about the stupidest way to die he can imagine, one day from freedom, in Yugi’s lumpy, musty bed.

At least then he’ll have to wash Atem’s blood out of it, and with it, the mold.

He groans, wraps his quilts around himself, and stomps to Yugi.

Drops into the pillows like a stone, like a dead weight.

And he might as well be.

He doesn’t really know what he means by this, doesn’t know what he wants.

Turns Yugi’s way, stares down his nest and waits for him to emerge, grumpy and pissed and without a wink of sleep behind him.

Maybe he’ll be satisfied if the Witcher acknowledges that Atem worked just as hard as him on making their house a home, knitting and sewing, fishing and scavenging and gathering firewood and being an overall fucking _joy_ in his monotonous, shitty life.

Yugi liked him from the start - still likes him - and Atem still can’t figure out what that means.

But, if the Witcher at least acknowledges they were partners in this horrible adventure, maybe then Atem can move on from his crush knowing his short presence in the life of someone so stale and significant was at least appreciated.

Maybe that’s what he wants.

_Appreciation._

The Witcher is a lump under blankets, and it takes him a minute, but he unburrows and turns Atem’s way.

Stares.

They both stare, except Atem gets to be on the petrifying end of it, as he always does. The auras around the Witcher’s eyes are meant to be witnessed in the blackest night, Atem thinks, when their glow is bleak and sinister, and still is the friendliest light to even to the most reluctant of travelers.

They watch each other for a long while; just lie on their sides and breathe to the rhythm of boards bending and creaking to the nature’s tantrum.

It’s not like that time on the floor, when roaches were stars and the cruelest enchantment in existence made Atem hear and see whatever he wanted, and not at all like when it wore off and he realized it for the joke it was meant to be. Not with Yugi cackling right next to him, telling him all he wanted was a handicap in a snowball fight but this - oh, this is so much better - but that’s okay because Atem will forgive him anything.

Lying next to him now is not like anything.

Atem isn’t sure what he’s looking for in the Witcher’s eyes, but he knows he can’t find it with words - can’t offer anything for it, not a craft or a coin trick or even a kiss.

Yugi’s eyes are soft, even his lashes look soft when they brush his cheeks.

They soften more once they find whatever they’re looking for, and, for a minute, Atem feels cheated, that if his witch can find closure, then so should Atem.

Yugi moves then, and the whisper of furs against sheets is the most racket they’ve made in an gentle hour of breathing and watching and not saying goodbye.

He pushes the blankets out of the way and stays on his side, facing Atem, watching what his eyes would do. Breathing.

Then shrugs out of his best pants.

Gracelessly, down his thighs and then over his socks. He keeps his socks on, lays the pants behind him.

Removes his underpants next - and his eyes are wandering now, finding points around Atem that take him miles away, make his eyes matte and distant.

Oh. _That_ is happening.

Atem doesn’t really know what to do.

Maybe he should help Yugi out of his sweater. Maybe he should throw his quilt off, too, except what he ends up doing is weaseling out of it gingerly.

Yugi pulls himself up then, stands on his knees, reaches for Atem - but no, he’s just reaching for his nightstand. Atem would rather watch his hand rammage for bottles than to look too closely at ash thighs where his sweater doesn’t hang low enough to preserve his modesty.

But then, they are not about to do a modest thing.

When Yugi finds it, he dips his fingers into it, scoops generously, and ruins a perfectly good jar of fish oil.

Lays back down on his side.

Reaches behind himself.

Atem swallows through a lump in his throat when he understands what’s about to happen to him - realizes what Yugi is doing - but he just can’t think of a single thing he should do. So he lies there and listens to Yugi’s forced breathing. Lets the uneasy thrill of it get him ready. Waits.

He likes it when Yugi’s breath hitches, or when his eyes lose focus.

Likes the idea of this.

Thinks maybe it’s good manners that he should try to roll him onto his back and help him out of his clothes, but he can’t make himself do any of it.

Yugi seems to understand, and Atem feels relief wash over him, soothing and tidal, that he isn’t expected to really do anything.

Yugi sits up on his knees again, and Atem thinks he should be the one rolling onto his back - and so he does, and Yugi goes for his pants - and so Atem helps him.

His witch is slow to climb. Careful to plant his leg on the other side of him, like he thinks Atem would spook like a startled deer, throw him off and dash for the door - like he was afraid of just that all day.

But he climbs, straddles.

Braces a hand on Atem’s shoulder, looks at a dull point just above Atem’s head, guides-

It happens.

Yugi doesn’t kiss him, not once, not anywhere.

His lips part in ecstasy, and Atem can tell he wants something between them.

He doesn’t have to see much of that mouth to know what atrocities Yugi spoke and did with it to earn its hideous tint. The thought of kissing it appalls him, makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand in disgust.

He doesn’t want it anywhere, and Yugi doesn’t put it anywhere it isn’t welcome.

Same for his tar hands, and Atem is very on the fence about those, too.

The Witcher’s all black inside.

All dirty.

Atem doesn’t really want to kiss him, and Yugi doesn’t really expect that he would.

He nibbles though, kisses the Witcher’s neck and interrupts Yugi twice before he learns his place. He gives up then, and lets him do the good work.

And then it’s done.

Yugi rests on his elbows for no longer than the time he needs to catch his breath, and pulls his legs back with far less care than when he spread them.

Looks for his pants.

[[OH. THAT IS HAPPENING]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/146393795685/from-ch17-of-witcher) (click, slightly nsfw) 

...Atem never did it to anyone before.

He lies like an idiot with his fly open, stares at a particularly nasty roach in the corner of the roof, feels numb and winded.

At his side, Yugi is settling in to get back to sleep.

Just like that.

And Atem is the stupid boy who grabs him, stupid boy who thinks this was anything more than a soulless freebie the Witcher gave a dumb prince to remember him by.

Atem grabs him, and gets slapped across the face for it.

Hard.

It stings, stings all the way up to his eyes where he feels his disenchantment welling up and streaking down his stinging cheek, wet and hot.

He looks into the Witcher’s eyes and sees resentment there, dissapointment - feral sharpness Atem had only seen on him when he meant to grant a wish as nastily as he possibly can.

Whatever else he thinks Atem wants from him, he’ll die screaming for it, like a stupid, rude boy who doesn’t know what he has.

“How about your hands,” Atem grabs the Witcher’s hand instead, his tar hand with its tar fingers, still sticky with the deed, still familiar. “You only like it when I hold your hands, don’t you? It’s because no one else is okay with it, right? And your mouth. I’ll kiss you. Let me kiss you.”

“Don’t make it into a deal, have some fucking mercy for once,” the Witcher hisses, pacified only by pity for Atem’s stupid, sorry self. Shrugs out of his grasp. Burrows back into his pile. “Should’ve let you freeze.”

And gods - he’s right - he gave Atem exactly what he wanted.

Frost begins to nibble on his fingers, and three uneaten roaches make their way along the wall.

Nothing will ever change here.

Atem’s quilt will be the Witcher’s quilt until it’s old and rotting and good only for the outpost shack, and the friendship bracelet Atem made him will slip down his skinny wrist one day the first fish trap gets stuck a little too hard.

The North will always be bitter and unkind, and it will never give away anything for free - and neither will the Witcher.

Except he did, just now, becasue in some capacity he is a friend.

Atem wipes his face when he realizes just how stupid he’s being.

Pulls the blankets over his head to hide his stupid little grin, lets the faint scent of mold soothe him.

He’s going home.

 

 

 

end of part 1


	21. prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some fanarts for this serious story: 
> 
> [ectology's](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/146195128640/yugi-dont-do-that) nugget
> 
> [yu-gi-ow](http://yu-gi-ow.tumblr.com/post/146114157742/all-i-got-from-chapter-19) gem

 

“Are we just gonna pretend it never happened?” Atem asks him in the morning.

“Yes.”

He broods. Can’t really argue with that.

Definitely not when the Witcher is full costume, with rat skulls and mask, no different than when Atem first spotted him stalking between the trees of his barren domain.

It's just another day in the Witcher's little hut at the coldest edge of nowhere.

It’s Atem’s turn to cook breakfast, and so he does it as he would do it on any other day while Yugi finds various chores to do around the house.

This morning, it’s hammering the hinges back into the doorframe, and the silence of the North is so piercing that every strike of hammer against steel is a crack against Atem’s skin. He flinches at every blow, and at intervals of blessed silence he relaxes just enough to break his nails bloody against his seat at the next bang.  

It’s the same when the Witcher stalks back in and stomps the snow out of his boots, same when woods screeches against wood, when fire cracks against the freshest branch.

It’s one of those days.

Days when everything makes them both restless, so Atem stays in his place and keeps his head low.

“You’ll give it back,” Yugi says suddenly, with that rusty whisper his mask makes, and Atem jumps and nicks his hand with the scaling knife. “Before I leave you, you’ll give it back.”

“...what?”

“The anklet. The one you carry for me with your foot, because I don’t have pockets.”

“Oh! Oh, yeah.”

“Find a witch or a shaman to unhex you, it’s not difficult. There’s nothing really wrong with it.”

Atem feels just a little bit coddled, like when Mana packed his lunch for him just before he left home (and told him if she catches wind of him gambling or bartering, she’ll come after him and shave his head. And _hell_ does he know how much she now wishes to take those words back).

He kind of feels bad for leaving the Witcher in his frozen hellhole to toil alone and without a kind word or company--

Oh, _hell no_.

“Fuck yeah,” he says and feels a grin tugging at the corners of his lips. “I’m going home.”

Then averts his eyes and stuffs himself further back into his chair, but he doesn’t stop grinning like a fool.

They eat their bland stew in silence, and Yugi carries on about his business as he’s had for centuries before Atem, and will for centuries after Atem rots in the dirt. And the next prince he seduces will be either as stupid as Atem, or as desperate as Atem, or nothing like him at all, and Atem knows the Witcher will never forget either of them and remember them by the pain they brought into his miserable existence.

Out of the corner of his eye, Atem can see Yugi's temper stirring, staring at him sideways.

Atem knows he's staring because there is a chill down his spine and spiders on the back of his neck.

Yugi has a way about his glare, and it's a very physical thing even at its weakest.

And at it's worst Atem knows it for trouble, because it’s in his bones and under his ribs.

He shrinks, pretends to be the most boring thing in the world.  

It’s a practiced routine, and it never had any concrete results except perhaps lessening Yugi’s terror factor - and Atem never dared to challenge him and so he has no data to tell him what would happen if he doesn’t yield.

“It occurred to me,” the Witcher says, “that you’ve seen a lot of my stuff in your stay here.”

He’s sitting in one of his chairs with his boots resting on the edge of his bed, knees bent lazily and a hand under his chin.

And, he’s staring.

His pinhole lights are dead-set on burning a hole right through the back of Atem’s head.

“Yes,” Atem says stiffly and tries not to lie. “Your things are, er, very good in their own ways, I’m sure. Unworthy of mentioning to anyone.”

Shit.

“It didn’t really occur to me,” Yugi says and absolutely ignores him, “until now. I don’t think I like you leaving and knowing things.”

_Shit._

“Do you want me to take a memory potion or something?”

“It’s easier to cut off your tongue and hands.”

Atem literally fucked this man last night, put his hands onto his gross body and held the quick fuck precious after he realized what it was meant to be. And now the mouth he offered to kiss is colder than this whole fucking country.

“Please don’t,” he mutters.

“Mm,” his witch whispers airly, and Atem isn’t sure whether he heard Atem or just ignored him. “Bring me my shiny drapes.”

Atem nods, goes to get Yugi’s mirror cloth from underneath a pile of junk that accumulated on top of it since the last time he’s seen it. It’s one of Yugi’s magical things - a perfect mirror if hung on something, but a dirty rag on the floor - a thing Yugi deems useful enough to keep inside the house.

This one he uses to mop up melted snow from the (un)welcome mat.

Atem spent an hour staring at his own starved and worn reflection the first time he hung it to dry.

At least Yugi isn't asking for the bone saw.

Atem hangs it up, as ordered, stares at what eight weeks with the Witcher have done to him.

Stares at the Witcher’s reflection, looming behind him, wrapped by the mirror's drapery, shrouded in his cloak and shadows, masked and half-hidden in the dim oil lights.

Something that lurks in any hoax photograph, except real enough to thread through his hair with its breath.

He eels his way behind Atem, slithers a hand around his stomach. Grinds rat skulls into Atem’s back.

Rests his masked face on Atem’s quivering shoulder and makes him stare at their reflection.

Catches him by the throat when he tries to look away.

“This is what crawled on top of you last night,” Yugi whispers tenderly and lets go of his belly. “Best you pretend, too, when you realize the lies I've told you.”

He lets his mask dangle by the string in his hand when he decides Atem’s lack of breathing isn’t enough to sate him.

He opens his mouth then, all wide and awful, licks his pearly teeth with his black tongue.

Nips Atem’s jaw, and the memory of wanting to kiss _that_ is now a gory lip-less and tongue-less nightmare.

“Tell no one,” Yugi hisses, “about my things.”

Pecks his cheek - and Atem blinks - and thinks the roof caved in and he’s gone deaf with white noise.

But it’s just rain, heavy and relentless, hammering against muddy earth and rooftops, hammering them both into the ground.

Roofs, houses, roads.

Rain.

It’s early afternoon high up in the northern wilderness, but at its border it is barely dawn.

Atem’s teeth are cold.

His teeth are cold because he’s gaping. He tastes rainwater and dirt and coal smog, spins to take in as much of this drab, gray landscape for a little taste freedom before he’s back breathing needles and scavenging for squirrels - tries to catch this world with open palms and make it stick to him.

But water only hammers at his palms.

He’s crying.

Rain washes his face of it, cold (he's been much colder) and harsh (he had it worse) and sweet, sweeter than life - but amidst thick droplets he feels tears hotter than any fire in the Witcher’s hut, hotter than fingertips tracing a thawing thigh.

He lets it blind him, inhales as much smog as his lungs would take.

It was all a dream, a daydream - a nightmare, but it’s over, it’s over.

Over.

He’s going home.

It’s over.

He’ll never see that animal or his mask or his mouth. Over, over.

But he knows blotches of spilled ink on his hands will remind him. Musty drapes will remind him, fish, fires, the cold - and every shadow, every shapeless blot in the darkest corner of the room will be the Witcher over and over again until he drives Atem mad.

(He’s already mad.)

“I sold you half-a kingdom for this,” he hisses into the rain and feels Yugi’s looming presence at his side. “It’s not over. You’ll come to collect.”

“Of course I’ll come to collect.”

“Collect,” Atem whips his entire being around, feels the world spin and catches glimpses of hard North in the vertigo - just to face this creature, face what he’s done to him. “Collect _this,_ you damned _liar!”_

He rips the fucking anklet off his foot and has just enough balance to throw it as hard as he can before his ass smacks into a puddle and dozes them both with mud.

It knocks the Witcher's mask off and bounces lamely, like a rock some fucking idiot would throw at a roosting dragon and gets burned to crisp before it even lands.

It lands.

Atem _shrieks_.

“What fucking war!” he screams from the mud like a loser who can’t take a girl’s disinterest. “Shit, _what war!_  Did I ever fucking like you at all, or was that a lie too!?”

“Of course not,” he hears Yugi throw over his shoulder.

He stalks away then, a great mass of horror both inside and out, so out of place here that Atem isn’t entirely sure it isn’t a mirage answering his screams.

Goes to collect his anklet.

Atem has never felt so _unfinished_ in his entire life.

“Where the fuck are you going!”

But Yugi doesn’t need to bother with him anymore because his unexpected visitor is a visitor no more. Gone are Atem's coin tricks, his stupid conversations and his help around the house, _gone,_ just like the Witcher wanted, and now he can be alone to stew in his vices - with no one to catch under his heavy hand in a bad mood, no one like and give him false hope he can be anything close to human ever again.

No one to pick down to the bones and regret it later.

“Help me undo it, you lying little shit!”

 _Nothing_.

Atem scours the mud around him, lets it squelch between his fingers until he finds a rock.

“The next thing you throw at me will cost you your hand,” Yugi hisses so viciously that there isn’t a hair left on Atem’s body that it’s standing.

“You don't even want the South! You don't need or want anything, remember?! So what fucking difference does it even make, just come and help me undo it!”

The turns on his heels - the Witcher does - and splits his face from ear to ear, all full of tar and teeth and savage delight.

“Hah!" he cackles nastily, just like the time he whisked Atem away to the glaciers to show him what he liked, and it was magic, and now it is Atem's pitiful insanity. "You want me to help you undo my own deal?”

_“Don’t you!?”_

Atem sits in the mud, drenched down to the bone and panting, and the rain just hammers and hisses around them and gives no shit about two small men whose minds it washes clean.

There’s spit between his teeth, stringy and thick.

He knows he’s crying.

“Don’t you?” he repeats, tender.

He holds out his hand then, just as black and caked with mud as the Witcher’s hands are marred by wickedness, dangles it like a glass of poison to a parched man lost in the desert who took to drinking his own blood and loving every drop of it.

Holds it like he’s not sitting on his ass with mud on his face.

“Come South with me. Now. Just come.”

[[JUST COME]](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/146331045595/come-south-with-me-now-just-come-from) (click)

(He's mad.)

(And the Great Witcher of the North was never _ever_ sane.)

 

 


	22. 2

 

> _a witch_ _went to town_

 

“The witch can’t come through.”

They can never know  _what_  sits on a high stool in their booth, small and gloved to protect their feeble eyes, hooded in feathers and rat skulls and shady business, rolling his eyes like he's rolling men into their graves.

The border guards wouldn’t let a starving kid drenched in mud as much as breathe southward without papers for two whole hours.

Eventually, they give into Atem's language, poise and color, and figure he's just another runaway lordling burdened with luxury and rich girls.

Rich girls who aren't nearly as exciting as a little witch who unsettles them far more than a witch should.

But the witch can't come through.

So the Witcher blinks away from daydreaming finger bones to pick his teeth with, all slow and sweet-like, and leers at Atem like he won something.

“The witch,” Atem grits incompetence between his teeth, “is coming through.”

“In a box.”

There must be pleasure in watching Atem’s humiliating bargaining and foot-stomping.

The Witcher dangles his feet and clicks his heels, bored and unfazed by his interrogators who know better than to touch a witch with anything other than a sword.

Gloats.

Embarrassment tingles behind Atem’s eyes, rushes into the tips of his ears, makes the world sluggish and extra crisp.

And Yugi’s looking at him, all  _tell them, please! you promised!_ and then bats his eyelashes to punctuate his sincerity. He’d flash his teeth, too, if it were just the two of them.

He hops off his stool when it’s time to leave, throws a look over his should like he'll remember their faces when the time is right.

Follows Atem, hops onto a fence around a pigsty decisively  _northward_ of the border, looks down from it.

“Great plan,” he says with little interest in Atem or his plans.

Looks around something to terrorize, but there’s nothing but rain and mud and muddy, wet pigs.

And the Witcher is eyeing one the same way he eyes Atem sometimes, after a particularly bland supper.

“How about we go to town for now,” Atem mutters, embarrassed - and shame is a pleasant feeling when the alternative would crawl under his skin and carve a hole in the bottom of his stomach because he can't keep his word.

But Yugi says nothing about his ill-fated initiation, just follows him, lurks in Atem's shadow and stalks his every step.

It shouldn't feel like Atem stitched death to his back; he did, after all, invite him.

"You'll regret saying that when I'll get bored," he promises, and the Witcher has a very strict policy on those.

But Atem is not friends with hindsight. Never was, not since the beginning of his awful adventure, not ever.

"Oh, sorry. Is it that you don't want to go, or..?"

“We have no money,” heart lips tell him, and what's behind them reminds Atem once again why he begged Yugi to stay mute.

That’s fine.

Atem bets the money he doesn’t have with the first street gambler he sees, collects his pennies - and as good as runs for it once his mark sees that Atem has a witch with him.

If not the Witcher, Yugi is still so obviously a witch that it’s as painful to see how little he's trying as it is to be around his unsettling aura.

Three diners refuse to serve them, heckle them out - and Yugi never bothers stepping any further than the front door and as good as heckles along with them. He seems a little less distracted by ill triumph, though, when Atem buys two fucking _scrumptious_ kababs from a vendor and hands him one.

Atem finds a pub, eventually, in a part of town that’s both a slum and luxury compared to Yugi’s hut. It’s desperate enough to take anyone’s money, and the kind of sleazy and filthy that makes the musty memory of fire and tea a pleasant one.

He buys them a beer each, and Yugi only sheds his feathers and preens.

Mouth, or course.

Two beers for him, then, and they’re watered down piss and fucking  _delicious_.

Yugi rests his chin in a gloved hand and idly stares around.

It’s hard to think. His thoughts race, and he can't catch even one.

There’s nothing right about this, nothing natural.

But there’s a razor-sharp lining of something not unlike a thrill underneath it all, and also dread.

Dread that everyone here can turn to dust in an instance, or retch their organs for harrowing hours before finding mercy in death - and not one of them is blessed for their ignorance.

The stupor made the drunks brave enough to hum the nasty tune of "witch went to town" and proclaim that there’s scum in the bar other than themselves. A degenerate licks the air and pats his lap for the witch girl to sit on.

And Yugi.

Yugi sits with his chin in his hand, unassuming and little.

A honey pot in a den of dogs who reek of piss and poverty.  

Atem’s mouth is dryer with every sip of his beer, his jaw tighter.

“In over your head, boy,” a barmaid snipes, and he jerks his knee under the table, makes the cups clank to his poignancy. She leaves a short glass of something neat and golden for Yugi, nods over to the pervert. “Got an admirer, witch girl.”

Yugi touches the drink not even with his eyes, just slides his stare smoothly along the wall all the way to her beady eyes.

She bothers to give him a glance-over, finally, and chuckles at what she finds.

“Not a girl,” she says loud enough for anyone who cares.

Everyone cares.

Everyone here, outside, in this entire town cares, stares at them, whispers behind Atem’s back, plots and cackles and pushes the walls closer to him, inch by inch.

The pervert pulls a chair for himself right next to Yugi, and Atem-

Atem very instinctively stands to protect the lady’s honor.

It’s an instinct, and he’s a stupid southern prince, and it’s an instinct, and he’s ready to beat the shit out of this guy anyway.

He's ready to beat the shit out of anyone, and hell did his fist itch for two months for something to hit.

The Witcher has yet to as much as take his chin out of his hand.

But he throws a dismissive glare Atem’s way - which sits him back the fuck down and tightens every muscle in his body, raises every hair.

“Witch  _boy_ ,” the pervert leers and straightens out his dapper dress jacket, “come upstairs with me, I’ll show ya something.”

_Holy shit._

Everybody in the world is about to die horribly.

 _Tak-tak,_ the Witcher taps his gloved fingers against chipped paint of their table _bored_ \- already _bored_ , and later Atem will remember that it's at this point that the Witcher began to act on his nasty promise.

“Gonna make is sweet for you, yes? Come along, ditch this kid.”  

Atem sits there, paralyzed, torn between breaking this sleazebag’s face for his lady’s honor, and wetting his pants at what the lady might do instead.

The Witcher moves then, finally, traces the rim of the short glass with the hand that isn’t holding his bored face, picks it up and looks the pervert in the eye as he empties it onto his nice jacket.

Lets it drip slow, like he’s taking a piss.

Watches.

And the pervert does not a thing. His fists are tight like someone took bleach to his knuckles, and he’s a gentleman in every way except literary, all made up and too good for a dump like this, and now he smells like a drunk no better than the one humming.

He’s red with rage in the face like one, too, but he doesn’t touch the Witcher - or, to him, a small witch boy with thin bones - doesn’t spit at him for his ruined jacket.

_Tak-tak._

Bored, expectant.

“Shit, kid, here? Little steel balls on you,” he grits his teeth and lowers his voice to a whisper. “Know anything for...er, canine madness?”

Nobody is dead, and the earth keeps spinning just as it would even if everything on its surface died, though much faster, and takes Atem’s head with it when his blood rushes back to where it’s supposed to be.

But it helps that the two men ignore Atem, it helps to not be on the receiving end of Yugi’s malicious scowl.

And even this man, who sits soaking in alcohol and thinks Yugi is just a boy addicted to the taste of magic not meant for him, feels that malice, twitches in his seat, clenches.

Clenches harder when Yugi lets his face slide along palm and drags his cheek with it, mashes his face into it, sighs like the world is about to end and it’s all very inconvenient.

“...does he talk? Is that a yes, or what?”

He’s asking Atem.

Atem is busy counting his own heartbeats and celebrating each one, and this guy is asking Atem to, what, answer on the Witcher’s behalf?

He looks to Yugi for orders, for guidance, but Yugi is just about done being bothered with this.

“Well,” Atem says and braces for death, “he probably knows a lot of something.”

Their sleazy pervy client - and Atem can’t really pick a better word for him - tries to smile, gives up pretending to be confident and tries instead to pretend he isn’t pants-shittignly intimidated but too committed to back off now.

Not many witches venture this close to the border, either side of it, really.

“Why not just talk?”

“Why not fucking ask him?” Atem groans through his teeth.

“Look, boy, whatever you’re doing with a pretty witch ain’t my business,” he holds his hands up and splays his fingers, “didn’t know you two come as a set. Need a blessing. Can he do it? I’ll pay.”

Shit.

He wants to look at Yugi, wants to see him nod his deceptively pretty head, wants  _permission_ \-  but the Witcher’s patience is a thin thing, it’s hairs strung tight in a bow, and one click tighter would snap them and slit the throats of anyone in their vicinity.

So Atem grits his teeth.

Grips the side of his stool, breaks his fingernails against it, and keeps the tension there and nowhere else.

“Can you get him across the border?”

He can’t, the man laughs, he figured he two of them would want a bath instead. They’ll find someone to do it if they stick around long enough, though - this dump is the right place for this sort of thing.

Should they?

The Witcher does things his own way.

He didn’t poof across the border; he must expect Atem to take him, so they might as well.

“I’ll pay to put you pretty boys up for a week upstairs, how ‘bout that, and you can find someone to get you across by then.”

Why the fuck would they do that?

“Worked for me, didn’t it?”

Did it, though? He needs a fucking doctor to give him his damn rabies vaccine, not a witch, but Atem supposes he’d want that kind of record off his papers if he’s trying to poach cracottas in southern sandlands.

Which he most certainly is -  _what the fuck else could he want,_ Atem thinks because he is a fool - and feels guilt pinch his eyes for letting it happen.

In the backdrop of the bargaining, Yugi cracks one eye open and catches Atem with it. Shrugs, like, why the hell not, and Atem is a witness to the Great Witcher himself agreeing to do the work of an apothecary.

And Atem is doing no work, so he will be sleeping outside in the mud.

“And dinners,” he tells the man. “Whatever, did you even bring what he needs?”

“What does he need?”

“How the fuck should I know,” and why the fuck is he looking for a witch without the ingredients ready.

In the end, it turns out he needs infected meat, and Atem ends up digging up graves in the dead of night to earn his keep, comes back with a constable on his ass, and it’s a blur, everything is a blur, this day is a dream and he’s feverish back home on the Witcher’s floor, writhing like his cousin taught him and burning up from the inside.

But it’s just rain, heavy and punishing.

It soaks through his furs like a dream and makes his sins twice as heavy, makes him waterlogged and drenched to the bone - and then the mud sticks in fatty dollops, and he’s threading water in his own boots.

There are wash barrels right outside the pub when he makes it back, brimming with rainwater that he can hardly see in the night, and what the hell, he can’t get wetter - and after months of dry frost on his eyelashes and bitter glass in his throat, the rain is almost warm.

So he undoes the fastenings on his useless fur coat, pulls his sweater over his head, unbuttons his shirt.

Not even his underclothes are dry, not even his skin, and he wishes he could take off even that just to feel clean again.

[[CLEAN] ](http://ectology.tumblr.com/post/147953176420/atem-taking-a-rain-shower-from-ch22-of-witcher)(click)

Lets the rain hammer his body and savours every shudder that isn't born of fear - stands there like a fool and lets it slap him in the face and wash the mud off him, wash away the horrors of the hard North.

And then he goes back to the horrors, wet and naked down to his underpants, with his dripping clothes in tow and a jar of dead man's meat - walks through the back of the empty pub all drenched and heavy.

The barmaid on night duty barely looks his way, with how little she cares for him and how much worse she’s seen.

Stomps upstairs, knocks.

Finds the Witcher down to his pants, too, under a ragged inn blanket on his cot on his side of the room, fucking around with a light bulb at three in the morning.

In the other corner of the room, there’s a cot with Atem’s name on it.

Dry and padded and probably full of fleas - but it has cushions and but oh, Atem misses cushions so, so very much.

But irritation gives way to unease once he sees him, with his black hands and his pointy teeth chewing his lip bloody, picking away at dead skin like it’s a snack to him.

There’s dinner on the nightstand, lukewarm and a little too sparsely packed with beans and rice, like a certain someone picked at it after he polished off his own plate.

The Witcher measures Atem, nods at the jar in his hand, puts his bulb away.

Beckons him with a smooth hand, summons him to either groom him or be cruel.

Atem thinks he wants the jar, but no - he lures him until he sits, brushes wet bangs out of Atem’s face, combs his brow.

“Do you like it here?” Atem asks like a fool who still thinks the Witcher secretly yarns for affection, means to ask if Yugi likes to be amidst people again, amidst real food and light bulbs and society.

“No,” is his answer. There’s sharpness to it, and Atem figures it’s time to yield and look to his feet. “I’d rather be home.”

“I don’t understand,” he says honestly, “why you wouldn’t want to be with people. Or why you agreed to come.”

“Mm,” is all Yugi says, and it’s a warning.  

Flashes a little fang, grooms with nails instead of soft fingers.

Atem swallows.

“Thin ice,” Yugi whispers, “boy.”

“Witch girl,” Atem snipes and sucks his lips in, feels fear wash over him, cool and familiar. “I’m mad,” he admits, “you’re gonna kill me and everyone I love.”

"Mm. Strange town to love."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is gonna go so well...


	23. 3

   

>   _a dime for a crown_  

 

It’s uncanny to see the Witcher doing little kindnesses, and at once Atem suspects there’s something very wrong.

They wake up at the crack of dawn to a rooster, and Atem falls off his cot and scrambles for cover, hides his face and chants  _'please please please'_  for almost a minute until Yugi chucks a boot at him and tells him to shut up.

When his wits return to him, he realizes Yugi too fell victim to the shit bird.

His eyes are a little too wide and startled, and he keeps rubbing crust out of them and chewing his tongue.

Atem picks himself off the floor, goes back to bed.

Sleeps 'till noon and wakes to find that Yugi doesn't - Yugi takes their coats downstairs to the back of the pub to finish drying them, paces their room, fiddles with the dead meat and the stolen light bulb, even leafs though a bedside Amdaut that isn't all that surprising to find right next to the Capitalist Manifesto since they're just a mile from the southern border. 

Shreds both, and Atem is neither stupid nor offended enough to challenge the Witcher over a moldy religious text.

"Did people give you trouble?" he asks and shimmies into his blissfully dry underpants.

The Witcher hums as he sets fire to holy pages on a plate from yesterday.

Atem waits for an answer, and then puts a shirt on before he goes to him - sees that the Witcher frying the rabies meat.

There's domesticity in that, and a razor-blade kind of safety if he walks on the blunt end of it. 

Atem's got this phantom urge to grab a quilt and sit at the Witcher's feet, and he can't shake it. His eyes fix on a blanket, his mind thinks of a good thing to lean on, his face tickles by a fire that isn't there. He almost craves to press against a knee, feel the rough texture of Yugi's pants, their musty smell, their warmth.

To those idle thoughts of want Yugi blinks slow and drags his irate stare up to Atem's face.

Atem takes a smart step back, finds himself sitting on his own cot instead.

"Do you 'know' it for everyone? That how you knew the perv just wanted a rabies shot?"

This earns him Yugi's interest, and there's yet to be a time that Atem doesn't regret drawing attention to himself with his stupid questions.

He's free now. There're people around, and there's a false security in that, because he who runs home from lions will only bring lions into his house.

Yugi puts away his delectable cooking.

"You," he rolls his eyes at what must be a very specific memory, "very obviously don't have many lovers."

Atem splutters.

"But admirers, yes? You're a prince - it's your most admirable quality. Did anyone teach you this yet?"

"...I know, alright. I'm not a child."

"Well," Yugi says and kicks his feet for a bit before hiking them all the way to the nightstand to rest there. "I didn't know at your age, but anyway. You think a man would touch me under the table and 'just want' a rabies shot, really?"

Atem's fingers curl loosely, and information doesn't quite digest well for him in this town, not when working girls gossip outside their door to the stutters of horse hooves and vendors, and there's more to occupy his mind than the winds and the solitude they bring with them.

He's can't stand it almost as much as he loves it.

And he has that luxury now - to not tolerate certain things.

Atem scuffs his foot against the rug, watches his anklet glitter.

"May I leave?" he decides. "I mean, is that alright with you, can I go out for a bit?"

Yugi raises a brow. He's leaning against the wall and as good as lounging, but there's an edge to it.

"I'm gonna kick his face in," Atem says - not that his witch is surprised by it.

"I'm flattered," he deadpans. "I've got things to do. Sit down and shut up, you're way more effort than you're worth."

And then there's wind knocking at their door - but of course there is no wind - and all the Witcher has to do is throw a demanding look his way, and Atem's on his feet looking for gloves to put on him.

He even tries to comb a few cowlicks with his fingers, but Yugi's violet strands grow against the grain.

He gets swatted, predictably, but the Witcher looks slightly less a feral child, and Atem can't help but swell a little and imagine that a few more towns down the road Yugi just might tolerate a comb and maybe even a half-decent sweater.

They both get the door.

There's a man with a knife there, and the Witcher makes a distressed noise, drags Atem back inside out of harm's way.

Holds on and hides behind his back.

Sure.

The man shuts the door behind him, shakes his knife, orders that they don't scream.  
  
His dumbass stance is too narrow and he's holding his knife overhead.

It would take very little to just grab his weapon and break his jaw with the handle - but Yugi clings tightly to Atem's elbows and whimpers into his back, a weak little coward with no one really to protect him. Got bullied by the wrong crowd until a boy saved his tiny ass, and now this - a horrible monster with a knife in their place of refuge, _someone please help him._

Atem takes it to mean that if he fights this man, the Witcher will smear the walls with their guts and eat their eyeballs.

"What do you want?" Atem demands, and his voice shakes for the wrong reasons.

But the man is wavering already - looking at Yugi like it's his own child he's threatening.

"D-don't cry, boy. I promise I'll let you both go, alright? You'll save my daughter, and then–"

"A hell of a way to ask for help!" Atem hisses.

"I got nothing to pay him with!"

Yugi peers from behind Atem then - stands on his tippy toes with wide eyes and telegraphs such sincere concern that Atem burns the image into his brain so that every time he thinks the Witcher's being kind to him he'll remember this face and know better.

The stories are true. Men would sell crowns for dimes to this charming creature, and...

And Atem sold half of his kingdom for a war he imagined under a nasty charm, and witnessing this is just about as painful.

"My... my daughter," the man says and lowers his blade half-way. One shove, and Atem can drive it into his lung and be done with this. "Spotted fever. Can you help?"

The Witcher nods, wide-eyed and sweeter than a litter of rabbits.

"Do you... _want_ to help?" And just like that, no more knife. The bait sits snugly in his stomach. Where is Atem's honor, where is his gallantry now? On the floor of the Witcher's hut where he cleaned his boots, that's where.

More eager nodding.

"You're an asshole," Atem spits at the father, careful to make no promises. "Just take us there."

'There' is a shack in the heart of the slum, and when the man said he has nothing to pay he really meant it.

The downpour is merciless to the tile shards this family has for a roof. It hammers and pounds and hisses, sends streams down clay walls and leaks so bad that in the half an hour it takes Yugi to inspect the girl it drips a whole bucketful.

The woman of the household boils it, offers it to Atem as tea.

No wonder the girl's on her deathbed. One look at two toddlers crawling on the damp wood floor with no underpants on, and Atem sits the wife down and offers her sanitation advice. Some good it will do her; the family can barely afford clothes.

So she says she'd rather pray to the mist wives - they brought a kindly witch to save her daughter - so it clearly works better than washing hands.

Atem surveys the room, and, sure enough, there they sit on a crude shelf above the dinner table, all six avatars of the mist sirens. 

Only the smallest stands a bowl, unwed - and Atem knows at once nothing can make this woman disobey the will of either one of her five wives.

The Witcher beckons him, still wide-eyed and adorable, all fluffed up in his drenched feathers.

Hands Atem a list he scribbled on the back of a greasy meat paper.

"Can't read," the father explains.

Neither can Atem.

The Witcher only cares about his runes when he writes them, but not for his calligraphy.

 'Buckℓߖ,' 'canclℓℓs,' nothing particularly noteworthy up until 'g㎕ℓ sߖಉℓs' and 'miℓkvvvℓℓds.'

"Got no money."

"Then go rob something," Atem snaps. "Had no problem stealing people, did you?"

He carries his daughter to the only room with the door before he goes, and Atem bars it with a chair for a good measure, so Yugi can preen and shuffle all he likes.

So he drops his rat skins and his gloves, finally, yawns like his jaw's been wired shut for hours, arcs his back into a neat crescent. Atem's no smarter than the desperate father, because there's comfort in a stripe of belly skin the Witcher flashes him.

There are no gods here.

"What are you doing?" he whispers and hopes no one's got an ear pressed against a paper-thin wall.

"Helping," Yugi says airily and runs his gross tongue along his lips.

Atem stares.

There's a blush spreading over his cheeks, and he resents it down to his bones for how much he wants to believe cute eyes and sincerity.

It's this blush and everything it brought that fluttered in Atem's chest at every tiny kindness the Witcher gave him, every time he made him tea without asking, every time he patted his head and tucked him in when the nightmares tossed his quilt away and left him cold.

And so what if the Witcher takes a few limbs from Atem, so what if he cuts him up and uses his fat for candles and his intestines for sausage links, it's fine, because Yugi is good to him, Yugi is kind.

"You're not about to save a girl for free," Atem hisses and regrets it, averts his eyes and folds his hands neatly behind his back. Knows he's in trouble.

He never liked his hair pulled, almost broke Seto's nose the one time he tried.

He had a nasty nurse as a child, and she would sit him on her lap and pull his hair back until he'd open his mouth for a spoon or a toothbrush, and she'd always scrape his mouth and he'd always cry.

If he wasn't a mad coward, he'd 'almost' break the Witcher's face for it, too.

But he tries to shrug him off, to make it clear he doesn't like this.

"Fine," his witch lets up and stalks away to shred the meat wrappers into pages. Motions that Atem should sit next to him and watch his hands. "She's got a cold. Doesn't take much to cure a cold."

He draws a glyph - one of southern circles - very simple, clean, and much larger than what he'd normally scribble in the margins.

Points out his stroke order, taps it with his pen over and over until he's sure Atem remembers. Throws scraps of greasy paper at him.

"I need twenty."

Atem throws him as dirty of a stare as he dares.

"You want to help out and charge nothing, that's your business. I'd charge a life for the whole thing, so..." the Witcher tells him airily, and Atem understands - heat blisters his cheeks, but he understands.

_Stupid._

So he scribbles away with a hand under his chin, scribbles four by the time Yugi has his bucket and candles all set up. He gives the girl an unfortunate haircut, checks on Atem - and three of them aren't good enough.

"Here," he plucks the quill from Atem's hand, lines it up with his nailbed and dots starting points. "Spacing. Please, Atem, this is almost offensive."

It's like he senses that his words sting a bit, like he knows Atem's worst insecurities. He's kinder when he wraps his charred fingers around Atem's and guides his hand - but that's only because this has to do with magic.

It's a moment - one of their moments - bittersweet and quiet, except it isn't quiet, it's littered with drunk banter outside their window, splattered with mud and rain, and it isn't bitter or sweet, and Atem isn't even sure it's a moment.

So he asks the Witcher if they're having a moment.

"Your whole life is a moment," Yugi snorts. "To me, anyway."

A thin sound of a stomach growling is just another thing to ruin their moment, but at least it's a familiar melody, as familiar as blizzard songs and kettle whistles.

But Yugi's relaxed behind Atem, even leans onto him a bit, ghosts his fingertips along the back of his neck, and it's almost pleasant enough to make Atem forget that the butterflies in his stomach are rats and nightmares.

And hell do they growl.

"...I'm hungry. You hungry?"

One look at him and of course he is, dinner plates don't get that clean without a good licking, and there were suspiciously few bugs around their room this morning.

"I'll buy something to eat, after we're done. Wanna come watch me gamble?"

"Wanna get your fingers broken for cheating?"

Fair enough.

They end up burning Atem's hard work, in the end, all twenty of his glyphs. But they remain engraved in Atem's mind, crisp and perfect, and knowing that he pleased the Witcher with them is a reward enough.

The girl wakes.

Atem's heart skips a beat when her mother comes up to the Witcher, holds his narrow shoulders and says just two damning words:

"Thank you."


	24. 4

 

> he gave you quarter, all rotten and black

 

"A bird," the Witcher demands, "a squirrel, or a rat. Bring it live."

Atem eats his dinner down at the pub, and it's savoury potatoes and a nice bird mush of some sort. It's hard to tell, but it's so good that it melts in his mouth, and he eats it like he's a starved beggar - which isn't all that far from truth.

He can't stand to look at Yugi's ashy face for a minute longer.

So he stares at girls earning their money and feels bad for them; they can all do much better than these reeking drunks. Boys, too - and one sizes Atem up to see if he's a customer or competition.

"Trouble in paradise?" the barmaid asks, and Atem realizes his staring is getting impolite.

"A'course there's trouble, this one's in over his head," her regular drops heavy into a stool at Atem's side. The counter gets crowded after two more join them, but hell - _people_.

People with faces and voices and banter, people who want to talk to him more than they want his shinbones.

"Witch girls don't stick around," one of them pats Atem's back with a heavy hand, but at least he means well. "Or boys. Don't let him steal yer heart when he leaves ya."

"Young love~" the maid mocks him and pours a pity beer on the house. "Whatever he's asking from you, get your money's worth."

"Come on, you all," Atem bristles but sips it anyway.

"Oho! Ya didn't–? He did! Thatta boy!" another pat, and Atem straightens his back, a little prouder.

The maid shakes her head, makes her hair bounce airily.

"Witches stealing boys left and right, tsk."

That kills the mood for two of the men, but the third one laughs with her, even gloats at his snivelling friends.

"Always a dumb southerner, eh."

"What," Atem rolls his eyes. "The hell would you know?"

"With that prince and all," he snorts. "Not giving your people a good wrap, kid. Two for two, 's all I'm sayin'."

Giddy excitement wells up under Atem's eyes, and his ears are sharp and interested. He's broke, stranded, trying to sneak back South without causing another scandal - he's as good as dead, anyway, with the Witcher himself brewing the Plague in a saucer upstairs - but this. This is _fun_.

"Dunno what you're saying. Been a bit busy."

Hoots of fraternal approval: a brother is getting ass.

"The, _you know,_ the Witcher. Snatched that prince right up, sucked him right outta his skin," one says.

"Stuffed his meat suit with voodoo," pitches another. "Tried to sell it back to daddy."

"Oh," Atem says and realizes he's just another Witcher story now, ugly and dusty in the back of everyone's mind, just like the siren buyer and the corpses in the streets. "Yeah, that. It's bullshit."

"See," the one nearest to him grumbles. "Sand fuckers wanted rail contracts, gone and shit the bed instead. Been telling y'all."

"Says who, some kid?"

"Some kid," Atem slides his ass off the bar stool and shrugs into his coat, "needs a squirrel to get laid."

"What, from the woods? At night?" the barmaid's tone shifts to disapproval, but not the motherly kind. "Tsk, ki-i-id. Don't. She's not worth it."

"Not a girl, I keep tellin' ya."

"Not until I see a cock on her she's not," she spits and turns back to Atem. "Wait 'till morning."

"What, are there wolves?"

One of the men laughs at him.

"There's worse things than wolves in the North, southern boy. Don't forget that, if you gonna go further up."

It takes every ounce of his restraint not to start laughing right there, cackling at smart northerners and their grand fears, laugh until his voice gives out and hysterics give in to waterworks of spit and tears and screaming at nothing at all. But Atem's a gambler, and the Witcher himself is the only one to drag fear right out of him.

The man is right, of course - if by 'up' he means literally upstairs.

"I'm good," Atem says.

"Don't let the Witcher snatch you too, ke ke ke."

 _Ke-ke-ke_ Atem's ass.

He's drenched to the bone before he even makes it out to the forest, and his water weight is bearable only because the sled weight was much worse.

The woods hiss at him in the night, ruffle the crowns of their trees and creak, snap and sprint around him, like his gas lantern is an illuminated heaven, impenetrable as long as he stays in its embrace .

 And just beyond his little light, the forest spawns nightmares. They circle him - and he is in the eye of their storm, just until he panics, just until his light goes out. They loiter, they wait.

"Do your fucking worst," Atem tells them.

But still, they persist, slithering down his spine and tugging at him with phantom fingers. All over his skin and under it. Eveyhwere. They hold his hands, and every now and then violets explode in pitch darkness. Leaves whisper to him gently to the wicked hiss of the rain, and there isn't a soul around him for miles and miles of slippery moss and branches.

The rain is snow now, and the blackness is so dark that it's a white wasteland.

He hears the fireplace.  

"I said, _do your worst!"_ he shouts at nothing and stirs terrors so large that skulls look small around their necks, and skins that clothe them rustle like feathers.

 His tiny light flickers, dims.

Goes out.

Atem's fingers shake over the switch, but he holds it down, keeps it off.

Waits, breathes.

Nothing.

"Fucking thought so," he spits.

He lights his lamp again and goes to get the fucking Witcher a fucking pet.

"Here's your pet," he says two dead rats later and shoves the shrieking animal at Yugi, who takes it gingerly and avoids both its claws and Atem's shredded and bloody hand.

He puts it in a lidded basket - hell knows who's giving him stuff - and in hindsight that's what Atem should've brought with him to save at least some skin.

Yugi's eyes are distant, and if his hands weren't black already, Atem is sure he'd see charcoal on them because everything the Witcher touches gets smudged with soot.

Including Atem's hands, when he grabs them.

He's not paying any attention; Atem is just another thing, another chore, just like charcoal runes all over the floor and the walls, as high as Yugi can reach to draw them.

He trashed the place. The host won't be happy, but the way Yugi is now, he wouldn't notice, much less care.

"Hey," Atem says and follows where he's dragging his scratched up hands, else he might just detach them to care for them. "Can I ask what you're making?"

"A spell."

"What kind of spell?"

"Nasty kind you don't want to see," he discards Atem to his cot and sits next to him to dab water over the gashes. He works it right between the creases, right inside the cuts, and he isn't gentle. Fingers don't quite bend the way he wants them to, so he forces them, and Atem flinches harder than he did when the damn squirrel bit him.

He's doesn't know if he should try to snap his witch out of it, doesn't think it's worth it.

So when Yugi's done, he's done, and he steps over Atem and goes back to scribbling on the walls and moving cups around.

Points to a box with medical flasks in it, and a syringe. The rabies inoculations, for the client. He must be downstairs.

So Atem takes it, takes care to step on nothing and almost makes it to the door.

"You're different."

It's got weight to it.

"If I'm being impolite to you, I'm sorry, I– Is that bad? Do you like it?"

"We'll see. Go get drunk."

Well, excuse him.

Atem's dumb eyes flicker down Yugi's body and get caught where they shouldn't be. It's a reflex, and to be fair, he has every right.

"If you want something from me," he says carefully with a fair bit of reluctance, "you don't have to get me drunk for it."

But the witch goes back to his witchy business and Atem as good as ceases to exist as far as he's concerned.

Fine.

"It's not fine!" he hiccups into the chest of their pervy client. "He's the fuckin' Witcher, I'm tellin' you. He's got a cock and everything."

The sleazebag laughs at him, pats his thigh.

The madness blessings lay forgotten in the box under their table, a footstool to the client worth a week of lodging.

But their contract is done, and Atem is free to moan and bitch his heart out.

Here, the creep tells him, he's got a gift for the lovebirds.

Hands him a decent bottle of merlot - much fancier than anything this dump has ever sold - and sends Atem up to kiss and make up.

So Atem does.

"I'll give you this quarter," he slurs and stumbles into their room, "to lift your shirt. Here, take it. You have to do it now. Like, lift high, okay? I wanna see your. You know."

He cups his chest and pretends there's volume there, smacks a quarter onto the bed stand. It sticks to his sweaty hand, and his witch girl takes it like he means to break it in half and saw off Atem's hands with it, inch by agonizing inch through meat and bone.

He takes it, puts it hell knows where, gets out of bed the moment Atem plants his ass onto it.

Charcoal fingers linger at the hem of an undershirt, and the room spins around them, around violet flames in Yugi's eyes. At least the oil lamp is burning, else Atem wouldn't see the answer to every mystery ever that was right there all along.

And then he lifts his shirt - high - and if Atem squints enough he could maybe see some doubt. Yugi's as much skin and bones as he was in his arms the night Atem fell in love with him. And his body is alright, and though he looks a little soft around his nipples, the answer's obvious, and Atem is sorely disappointed.

"Not a girl," he mutters, sour, and takes another swig of his sour wine.

The Witcher puts off murdering him to let him know how utterly disappointed he is.

"You saw my prick," he accuses, tucks his undershirt into his pants and ruffles through his rat skins, fishes out a gutting knife, drags the blade along Atem's arm. It's touch is razor-sharp and almost intimate.

"Well, mh," Atem drinks one more for the road to afterlife with his free hand, lets wine spill between his lips as he yawns. "The perv said."

"Ah, there we go, the perv," Yugi mutters absently, plays with blade and skin until he's bored of it, until he wants a face instead of arms. Presses the tip to Atem's lips, wipes the wine, sniffs it. "Did the perv tell you to kiss me?"

"Mh," Atem says, _'oh yeah, he did,'_ he means, but he doesn't really want to move or do much of anything. "M-hmm, why?"

Yugi scrutinizes him for a minute, then chucks his wine out of the window.

It shatters a world away from them.

"Mm I gonn' die?"

"Not from the wine," Yugi snorts, pulls Atem's boots into his lap to unlace them, pulls his sweater over his head. Static sparks and startles his hair, cracks like Yugi's fire cracks back home. "Just drugs. Let this be a lesson to you. He even put witch hazel for me, a very good one, hah. Perv really wants to bind a magic pet. Sleep now," - he shoves at Atem until all he sees is the wall and darkness - "he's coming. Go to sleep."

He can't get his arms to turn him around, can't keep his eyes open, but he _hears_.

Hears the long creak of the door, hears its rusty hinges moan to someone who shouldn't have a key.

Hears distant mattress springs protest against an unwelcome weight, hears filth with Yugi's name in it - Atem's name, too, 'but later, when it's his turn to be a good boy' - and then nails breaking against the wall, scrambling.

A sickening crunch of hexes  splintering bones time after time - and shrieking. Muted, endless shrieking, except quiet and airy and wooden, severed in the vocal cords, perhaps even literally.

And then a soothing voice, familiar in its sweet menace.

"Bad boy," it purrs, "wait there a sec."

And then Atem's bedsprings creak, but Yugi is light and unassuming.

"Are you awake,  Atem?" he says and tucks a lock behind Atem's ear. "You don't wanna be awake for this. Just sleep it off."

 


	25. 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHAPTER WARNING: kinda disgusting.

  

> _a Posie he named, come out of your grave_

 

He's warm. His forehead feels damp and cool, pressed against the peeling wall, and a little itchy. But under his thin blanket, he burns. There's heat in his throat, all the way down to his belly,  a smoggy acidic kind of heat and blisters for hours before it erupts, smokes him out from the inside.

And behind him, hell.

Sticky, consuming, stitched into the skin of his back - and its roots squeeze the air out of him.

It breathes fire into the back of his neck, scrapes his skin absently, idles.  

"Awake?"

Nothing chills better than fear.

Atem shudders, every inch of him shudders, even his toes shudder against toes that aren't his.

"Awake," the Witcher huffs against Atem's neck and lets his lips catch on skin. "Good, listen."

This is not at all what waking up in someone's arms should feel like - not at all what he thought Yugi felt the morning the mask came off.

But it makes sense now - the Witcher's knack for tying Atem up and generally wanting to gut him - because a stranger's embrace makes his skin crawl and his mind scream that whoever it is, he crawled into Atem's bed with a nasty purpose.

Into this cot with its dubious stains, all three feet wide and just big enough for thirty minutes of rent.

It's just the Witcher, though.

 _Just_ the Witcher, huh. This makes his skin crawl in a different way, except the Witcher's hands simmer and char him with familiar coals.

This is payback, Atem knows. Petty and awful, and Yugi tugs at his hair for a full minute just to get him breathing again.

"I'm breathing," he promises but can't shake light nausea welling up in his insides, or bring life into his dead limbs. "Sorry. I get your point, I'm sorry. Please, unless we're doing something–"

Yugi rips at his hair and kicks the back of his knees lightly.

"Mind out of the gutter! What do you remember?"

What Atem remembers - when he remembers it - are sounds of cutting wood with a dull knife, wet sounds, a headache, kettle screams and hushed church prayers. He remembers their perv and his wine, remembers believing the man when he said that if Atem acts just right, says all the right things and buys the prettiest flowers, then maybe he can thaw the frost off Yugi's rigid heart.

And then order comes into his mind - and the wood is bones crunching, and the rest–

He jolts, heaves himself off his squeaky cot, but the Witcher is quick, the Witcher's hands are quick to latch onto hair, to shove a knee into his spine, and then grind Atem back into the musty mattress with his entire weight.

And Atem is lucky he's grinding him with a knee into a bed and not with a pestle into a mortar. 

He knows better than to fight back. There is no blade against his throat, no gore pouring out of him, and he's fine, he'll be good.

He'll be very good.

"Breathe."

Atem does as he's told, inhales ruddy air and does his best not to gag at the stench of raw earth and wet coins.

"I'm breathing, I'm sorry."

"Good, I take it the drug wore off," the Witcher says evenly and soaks each word with measured nonchalance. "Now, if you're done being a pest. I'll take your things outside, and you won't turn away from this wall," - he knocks Atem's head lightly against peeling wallpaper - "And I'll walk you out. Close your eyes. Am I understood?"

"Yes! I promise, whatever you want. What... did you _do_?"

"Made some spells."

"While I was–" while he was out cold, right there, four feet away from _it_ and _that_ , and, and. And. "Out of _him_ –?"

"Look at the wall."

His back feels it, his arm that's facing the scene feels it, and he can taste the gore through pores in his skin. The side of him that's near the gore is repulsed, disgusting, made unclean by what rots beside it.

The door creaks for the last time he'll hear it, then closes behind his things.

"I'm casting hysteria, among other things. Don't be near when I do," Yugi tells him, and there it is, the Witcher's scrappy kindness that spares his eyes from horror and his body from witchcraft.  "Don't ask them what they've seen, don't look them in the eye when they tell you."

Buy supplies, wait at the barn by the pigsty near the border.

_Don't open your eyes._

He steps into something nasty, and it squelches between his toes until he's outside.

Yugi passes him a rag to wipe it so he wouldn't leave bloody tracks, and sends him away.

Atem walks.

Then sprints.

Then dashes straight for the border.

He runs, runs home, all the way home–

But the border is just a long stretch of chicken wire and sparse outposts - smudges in the distance, really - that go on as far as the gray skies stretch above them.

And beyond them, no snow, no marker posts. No frozen lake.

No hut, no home. 

And then everything comes out, his fears and feelings and wine.

He braces on the fence post and retches under a tree, turns his guts inside-out and expels his chunky insides right down to his bitter soul. And just when he thinks there's nothing left of yesterday's mush, there's more. And more, and staring into the chunky mess makes him sick again, smelling it stings his greasy nostrils.

It comes in waves until all that's left is bile and poison, and even that goes.

But the pigs come, and his dinner is now their dinner.

He gets as far away from their slobbering mouths as he can, drops to his knees by the clearest puddle and washes his mouth with it - washes acid from the folds of his lips and tears from his wretched face.

Gods!

Whatever he's done, forgive him, forgive their worst child whatever offence he committed against the Maat. _Please._

His teeth chatter around his prayers - around every prayer he knows - and by gods, there's sunlight in his blood and so he knows every single one, and it takes him _hours_.

But the sky remains overcast and impenetrable, and he knows Ra isn't there to hear him beg.

So instead he begs to be let into blackjack bets.

Grows more bold with each one until sore losers twice his size have enough of him and toss him into the mud by the scruff of his neck, and there're boots to his stomach and names to his mother, for cheating or begging or loitering - but in reality for just being too good.

They hold him down and turn out his pockets once, twice, and twice he is left with pennies he turns into dollars in another bar to the foul stench of greasy men with greasy fingers, and their noxious alcohol, and their piss.

He stretches his money as thin as he can, buys humble dried fish and jerky and flatbread and half-stale eggrolls, sunflower seeds, four large potatoes and the word's shittiest rucksack from a beggar, but he can feel it, taste it in the air - the Witcher's hysteria.

The wind carried it ten blocks from the slums, from the pub where he cast it in the dingiest loveroom.

It's in everyone's eyes - the fear, crisp and minty - it's in irate commuters bumping into each other, and an underlay whisper to the rain: hushed rumours about what the constables found in the slums this morning, about what they've seen and heard and _imagined_.

It's late afternoon when the first real fight breaks out, when bloody teeth splash into a puddle like the raindrops.

It's near dusk when he spots a mob of boys taking turns kicking a raggedy old man deeper into the mud.

Atem has to run from two vicious women until a third one gives him directions to the post office.

He rushes there. Nearly gets muscled out for being muddy beggar loitering to dodge the rain, and even after he pays for a telephone call the chunky postmaster treats him no kinder.

"Who the fuck would your kind know with a telephone?"

"Someone who'd rather pay for one than collect chins."

The rain batters at the glass front of the shop, and it's hard to hear over it, but there isn't a booth.

"Fifth Sun Palace, please. The golden rooms," he tells the operator.

She laughs at him.

"Want me to ask for the King, kid?"

"No. The prince, please." Atem insists.

"The sightings hotline is closed."

The _what_.

"For fuck's sake. Do a reception call, then, tell him you have a man on the line who's refusing his two hundred duels."

She sighs.

"...please hold."

The switchboard cracks angrily, and not even thirty seconds passes before–

"Where the hell are you and if you aren't dead I'll put you in the ground _myself,_ so help me gods!"

Seto's sharp voice is rough around it's edges.

Not shaky, no. Nothing can shake that man, but it's jagged, hushed by the static of the connection, by the rain - by his shrieking devil chicken no doubt throwing a tantrum that Set's attention isn't focused entirely on her - but oh. Oh, what would Atem give to listen to his tirades and threats for the rest of his life. What wouldn't he give - what _did_ he give? Half a-kingdom, that's what.

But _oh_.

Oh, Set.

"...Atm?" he demands when Atem can't get his words out. "If you aren't the damn crown prince, I'll personally–"

"No, it's me," Atem chokes, "it's me, Seto, I... oh gods. H-hello."

There's a sharp huff on the other end, a measured exhale.

"Hello," his dear cousin says and takes a few seconds to believe him. "Where are you. Is _that thing_ nearby. Can you talk."

He doesn't ask if he is alright, he cares far too much to make Atem face his grim reality.

"I..." - he wipes rain from his eyes and smacks his cheek - "I'm at the border-town, the one in Wetlands. Seto, can you just. Talk to me. Please."

"Hole up somewhere, you idiot. Or cross," Seto demands, full of pragmatism and crisis management. "I'm coming to get you. Is it near you?"

"What?"

"Is that ugly thing near you?"

Rain picks up, hammers at the window worse than Atem's ever seen it.

Dusk sets rapidly.

"...not right now," he says and brushes the transmitter with his lips. It's rancid - he almost gags. "I'm so sorry. Tell dad I'm sorry, I– I miss him. Tell Mahad I miss him so much. I don't– I'm not walking out of this, Seto, I don't–"

"Well, you little shit," Set bites. "I told your Father from the start not to look for you, you'd just give up and die anyway. So die. Why the hell did you call me?"

Atem flinches at his words, flinches like he does on days Seto refuses to call their dad his own or address Atem as anything but Prince.

He flinches and cries to his own private grief, and laughs, too, through strings of spit between his teeth.

"Gods, I needed that, hah" he murmurs into the receiver. "Still no idea what to do, but..."

But...

"Holy zephyrs mighty."

But it's not Seto, it's the postmaster. He hisses and reels behind his counter, screams something foul at Atem, gets a bat from somewhere.

Atem looks where he's looking and freezes from the inside out, and there isn't an inch of him that isn't trembling within seconds.  

It's raining tar.

There's panic outside. Screams. Hell breaks through the clouds, and with it, nightmares.

Thick blots of black fat pound at the glass, leave greasy streaks like there are phantom fingers smudging everything.

A man wrestles his way inside, speckled with black oil and terrified worse than a cornered dog, and twice as rabid.   

Postmaster comes at him with his bat, and amidst the noise Atem can still hear Seto telling him through the receiver:

"You run."

He doesn't bother with the hook switch, just dodges the bat and heavy hands of the intruder, dashes outside where no one else would rather be.

Tar blinds him.

He's lucky to get absorbed into the shrieking stampede of pedestrians and get shoved around every which way, because there's place for him under their unyielding stomping among the bloodied bodies of the slow and  the small.

The crowd batters him for what feels like a terrifying eternity. They bump him with their bodies and squeeze him through the gaps, spin him until he's dizzy and overwhelmed by the sheer number of them after months of isolation.

And when they spit him out at the margins, he runs against the grain, through the back alleys and as far from their hysteria as he can.

But it follows him.

It's in his teeth and in his knuckles, in the front of his head where anger swells.

But he knows things about this spell - and perhaps that's what stops him from kicking downed men and shattering shop fronts.

There's an orphanage on the main street with glass windows and dismal shutters, and the nun ushering the children inside ushers Atem along with them.

He stands among blackened and sooty kids and drips tar to the floorboards, as confused and frightened as the rest of them, even smaller than some.

And then the nun shrieks, shoves her way through the snotheads and bars the door. They scream and beg her, but she won't let them in, just sinks to the floor and wheezes.

There's a murmur among the kids, and the ones by the windows hiss and dash deeper into the house at what they see in the streets.

When Atem sees it, the part of him that still felt joy and had hope dies - flickers out like a snuffed candle - and all that's left of him is that crunchy fear Yugi had dragged out of him every time he brushed Atem's skin with a blackened finger or an idle blade.

Not a soul is outside anymore - at least nothing with a soul is.

Atem sees him, then: the Witcher.

Strolling through his decrepit glamour, a nasty blot between the houses that line his wretched parade.

The Witcher glides, a heap of furs soaked in tar and wickedness.

Black leaks down his awful mask.

Pinhole lights cut through the downpour.

And trailing the Grand Witcher of the North are all those who had thanked him for his petty little favours.

They cry tar, too.


	26. 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHAPTER WARNING: animal violence

 

> _take one step forward, and two steps back_

 

Hours later, pitchforks, torches.

Nothing unites better than hysteria, and the mob thins itself out as it goes - because even in unity someone's bound to stand out the wrong way.

Atem considers joining them

Not because he wants to, but because girls begin whispering about horrid things trapped in their imaginations, and Atem remembers what the Witcher told him when he crawled into his bed: he shouldn't ask, he shouldn't look.

A few girls drop into fits - boys too - and even the comatose nun contorts and speaks in tongues.

Atem decides it's his time to go.

So he trails the mob, steps lightly around looters to avoid claiming what isn't his or theirs.

Parts way with them at the turn to the barn, and what they're looking for greets Atem there, stiller than death and hovering like a ragged scarecrow on a fencepost.

He drips black soot, and his cronies cower in the mud as far from him as they dare to be, in a scorched and crying pile of huddled bodies. And he's the Witcher alright, not a hungry witch girl who lives in a tiny room where whores make their living with a boy who's in over his head. He's the Witcher - but his name is Yugi.

And Yugi likes to pretend he's tall.

He likes to stand on chairs and tables, and every time he does it he squints down in theatrical pleasure. 

He's doing it under that mask right now, Atem knows.

There isn't a bone in his body that isn't wet and black, and he's not sure Yugi recognizes him, or cares about him at all.

"H-hey," he mutters around his dry tongue. "Is it okay if I come closer?"

It's fine. He's not sure what to do with himself, so he sort of leans numbly over the fence right by Yugi's feet.

"Why?" is all he can ask. "Why's the world ending?"

A man breaks out sobbing when he sees that someone's brave enough to approach the Witcher and speak to him - tries to beg - gets the mask's attention and faints on the spot.

Yugi hisses at the pile, annoyed.

Turns back to Atem.

"Got bored."

Atem can't even tell if there are any tears left in him.

But Yugi's kind, Yugi takes pity.

"Fine," he concedes, and his whisper is twice as menacing when he hates what he's saying. "Got paid to overkill it. I stuffed a doll into our friend this morning - there's no way you don't know what that means. Go away now, he'll only chase northward."

"You..." Atem stutters, "I... we were going South."

The Witcher trains his mask on him, and Atem bows under the weight of its stare. So Yugi squats, and his waterlogged furs doze the ground with ink like a wet dog shaking.

Squats, pats Atem's head kindly. 

"The border," he says and points, "is right there."

No way in hell anyone's guarding it.

 _You run,_ Seto told him.

He doesn't run.

It's too dark, too wet.

Atem might catch a cold.

And, it's wrong to cross without papers, he doesn't like the idea of that.

He likes being groomed, though. Yugi's nails are pleasant against his numb skull, when nothing but oily rain had touched it for hours.

"You're so difficult," Yugi accuses.

But hark, here comes to mob.

They carry bats and metal rods and swords far longer than legal, and crucified between two polls they drag with them a witch.

She - or he, it's too dark to tell from afar - is still alive; the eyes still have a dull green glow to them.

The pile of people Yugi appropriated stirs, sobs, begs for a rescue, and Atem backs up a few steps, realizes he'll be the second on their list to get torn into pieces before they turn on each other after the Witcher bails and ditches him here to die.

As the light of their torches approaches them, it begins to dawn.

Yugi is back standing on his fencepost, tall and ugly, daring the cowards to be brave. But their bravery fails them when it's not children that they're trampling, and so they form in a thin crescent around him and uneasily wait for someone to throw the first stone.

The hysteria is wearing off.

Atem feels it leaking through every crack in him, out of his fingernails and through his nose - feels the spitting rain wash him of it.

And the thinner the tar, the thinner their taste for violence.

Their wits return to them, and with them, fear. It's in the air, heavy and as silent as their graves will be if they don't run, and Atem thinks they're meant to scatter now and end this whole thing.

But the Witcher won't have it.

He tips his mask over his head, and whispers rustle through his disoriented spectators - even a few smart runners - and lets black rivulets from his hair streak his face.

No one's here from the slums that have seen his small self, and no one can see much of him as he is now.

But in the middle of the crescent, Atem is close enough to see the Witcher's teeth, the curl of his lips.

His live fucking squirrel.

_Oh gods and the world they created for their amusement._

It's so little in his black hand, tired stupid from trying to chew out of its basket all night, with half of its nails broken against Atem's fingers when he plucked it from its nest. It's such a little thing, so powerless to stop what's coming for it.

What's coming for them all.

The Witcher yawns then, like he yawned for Atem many times, tame and comfortable and sleepy on the odd nights he watched Atem waddle around with charmed fondness in his purple eyes.

Yawns and –

Bites into the screeching animal's belly - opens wide for an apple and crunches into it - and little hands spasm and put up as much of a fight as they can against a giant.  

His face gets smeared with gore, bloody and shredded and slimier than bile.

He's quick to get it done.

Atem's heard of necromancers skinning their offerings with teeth and savoring their pain and taste, but Atem doubts Yugi ever did,  and he's as clinical about it now as he is with most things.

He tears a chunk right out of the fur, tips the little body high above his head, slurps out is insides - sucks the innards right out until he gets the heart - and there, it's done, it's dead.

Swallows, lets it drop to the ground and wastes no motion rubbing his wrists together.

The Witcher's magic is underwhelming. None of Mahad's smoke and mirrors, none of Mana's pink hearts just because she can.

It maybe sparks, but  just barely.

But then the pile of debtors shrieks and scrambles, and here's a green light in their palms - no doubt form where a necromancer carved spells into their skin to leech a bit of life out of them to animate his stuffed minion. That's where the Witcher's showmanship lies, not in his own hands but in the minds of those who see them.

They run, finally free. And what they were forced to keep warm - whatever Yugi made them bring out here - stirs under the downpour, gargles.

Atem has a pretty good idea what the Witcher stuffed with voodoo in the room Atem thought he brought a little humanity into his blackened heart.

Whatever he made of that man, Atem doesn't get to see it.

The Witcher hops off his fence-post and scoops him up around his waist.

Forces him to walk forward.

Just like that, just embraces Atem's waist and makes him walk away from what he unleashed behind them, from what rips into the fleeing crowd with sounds that sear his brain.

Yugi holds him steady, makes sure he stumbles on nothing and remembers to breathe.

His hands squish wetly into Atem's drenched coat when he shoves him through the border outpost and pulls him out on the other side.

"I can't," Atem murmurs. "Stop. I can't."

There's a watchtower right there, Yugi tells him, and it's probably as empty as the customs. They'll rest there. Decimating a town is exhausting work.

But Atem stumbles, takes him by the hands because it's the only thing he's more or less allowed to grab, and stops him.

"I _can't_ , you bastard."

He's too tired to avert his gaze - too tired to defer to him - so he stares at the auras around the Witcher's eyes and silently begs him.

"Hah," Yugi snorts, and his gory mouth stretches into the wickedest of grins. "Haha!"

He explodes, all giggles and snorts and mirth, mean-spirited but oh so very amused.

Atem's got a palm over his greasy lips before he thinks any better, makes more mess of Yugi's face than it already is.  

The squirrel guts squelch between his fingers.

Yugi scowls at him at once, hisses into his hand.

 Atem might as well die.

"Look how strong you are," he leans in and speaks against the knuckles of a hand he's about to lose. "Laughing at a thing you broke. Just take me home. I can't."

He doesn't dare to press too hard into the Witcher's face, and he peels his palm just enough to catch his lips when he shrugs out  to tell Atem to go fuck himself.

"Our deal," he hisses, "is done, my prince."

"No,"  Atem hisses right back. "You still owe me, you damn liar. You came to trash this town, nothing to do with me. We'll just try again, okay? You love loopholes, and you like me, and your feet are probably all blistered to hell - I know how your boots get. You didn't even lock the door, did you? Let's just go--"

Frost punches the breath out of him, frigid and punishing to his drenched and lead-heavy bones. It licks every inch of his skin with blades, breathes harsh winter into him.

"– home?"

Winter comes South instead, home comes South. 

"How dare you say I owe you anything," the Witcher spits squirrel blood at him. "Have it, then. Have your 'home,' boy."

 


	27. lucky 7

Atem doesn't look at him, lets no whimpers escape his stupid mouth, and keeps his movements as few and as cautious as he can. 

They climb ladders up to an elevated outpost and find no one manning it. There's grain mush half-done on the little firepit stove, and the first thing the Witcher does is light it back up and steal a few spoon-fulls from the pot. 

There are some supplies around, abandoned in haste when tar came down from heavens, but Atem doesn't know if he'll be welcome to any of them.

But it's too cold, too wet.

He sheds his clothes modestly out of the Witcher's sight, splashes the floor with black rain. Wrings everything the best he can down the hatch and receives a second set of laundry to do for doing such a good job with his own.

So he dumps out Yugi's pockets, shakes his patchwork pants free of little bones and hex bags and roughly carved wooden idols no bigger than a toe or an eyeball. Scraps of metal drop heavy onto the floor, pebbles, old coins.

A quarter of unified currency falls last from a pocket that's least likely to lose it - shiny, minted under a pyramid seal and dated a few years back, so one from the South. Probably one of Atem's. 

Traded for mercy. For a name of a fiend and a map to nowhere.

It treads easy between Atem's fingers - a familiar weight, a familiar texture.

He doesn't drop it this time.

He finds more rocks in the rat coat, but there is fire inside them like a cherry pit, and things that fall from that point Atem knows to have cost lives. Jewels set in old gold, inscribed with runes and doubtless magical. A hairpin that burns his fingers when he touches it, the knife Atem mustn't touch.

A petrified serpent egg, a firebird feather.

...the Witcher isn't a fucking idiot to just carelessly dump such thing onto Atem's lap.

But he doesn't think about it. He does as he's told, because here is a safety in that - and his mind is at peace when there's nothing in it to trouble him. 

The downpour is clear now, almost icy, and so he hangs the laundry and lets the rain do the job for him.

Army men are large men - and guarding borders isn't an army woman's job - but neither Atem nor the Witcher are large men.

He finds Yugi drowning in military trousers far too big for him, baggy and catching under his heels whenever he tries to walk.

Overalls are what awaits Atem, and a dry shirt with an intimates sheet, because the Witcher took the shorts on the count of seeing them first.

There's only one set of spare clothes, but there are blankets, dry rations, matches, knives.

Atem examines each item carefully, remembers being present at the signing of the Equipment Act when swords and war were of interest to him, decides tax funds were siphoned here.

He doesn't look at the Witcher, doesn't dare breathing his way.

Eats his mush, tries to dry out the food be bought, brings their clothes inside.

Doesn't look at the Witcher.

"You're going to sleep," the witch demands when Atem decides counting matches is imperative. "Now."

So Atem nods with dry eyes, wraps himself in a thorny blanket, lays down on the mat Yugi unrolled for them.

"That won't do."

Of course it won't do. It's far too cold, too narrow.

He shudders every time their elbows bump, jerks at every accidental contact until the Witcher has enough of it.

"Ah, a 'small thing,' huh," he parrots after he makes Atem rest his head against his ashy shoulder. "Forgot to thread lightly, hm?"

"I'm your friend."

Yugi chuckles, but he's bitter about it, and Atem detects no malice.

"Hah. Are you upset with me?"

He cursed him. He cursed Atem on a whim, screwed him out of two deals and tricked him, just because he dared to call the Witcher's house his home.

"Certainly not the worst I've done today, just a bit of bad weather to follow you around. Serves you right to think I owe you something."

"It wasn't fair."

The Witcher threads through his hair, traces the shell of his ear and every clip and earring in it.

"It was," he coos. "Be humble. I took you in and nursed you - could've snatched you and took you apart instead, that's what you owe me for. But we don't talk about that, do we?" - he pecks the top of Atem's head fondly - "no, we don't."

With a rabid, tar-soaked town behind him, Atem says to the Witcher:

"But we're friends."

Yugi sighs.

"We're friends," he whispers.

"It's all too much for you, isn't it. Tsk, boy..."

He must still have a heart because he takes pity. Comforts Atem, lulls him to sleep easily, whispers a story into his ear about the first eastern king who ordered a great wall built to divide the first quarter of the world, and how six generations of children were lost filling in the caves beneath it, and six generations of mothers worked into their graves to feed six generations of fathers who died chipping cliffs into bricks.

The seventh king inherited the wall and fewer people than he had dragons in his whole country.

"He was the last king in the East," the Witcher whispers to him. "Queens came after him."

But the second queen would inherit dirt and no people at all. So the first queen in the East stole magic from the world and spent her life locked away with her mages, inventing ways to make children born of magic, with two or one or no parents at all, born healthy when conceived sick, born living when stillborn.

"You were born to witch magic," Yugi tells him and plays with golden strands in Atem's hair that serve as evidence to prove exactly that. "Even if a proper mage performed it, it's still witch magic, stolen and everything. Be humble."

They sleep through the day and through the night that follows it, occasionally getting up to drink lukewarm tea and chew on ration bread.

Then just slip back into the warm embrace of blankets and awkward body heat, and go back to sleep just short of being in each other's arms.

Atem comes to hate the Witcher's black arms that night. Before, they were sin and dirt and a testament to the ugly side of the world, but now he just hates them. Resents them, wants to paint over them and never look at them again.

Atem's skin is all sticky dirt and earth; and he wakes to nightmares of the rain's relentless hammering.

But the Witcher looks worse. He's all clay and mud dried pale and crusted in chalky smears. There's still blood in the corners of his lips, caked on along with mud and soot.

When they wake, the only thing Atem dares to ask of him - in a very polite and roundabout way - is to have a sponge bath so that he looks less a beggar.

"Not that you'll take me to a town again anytime soon," Yugi tells him offhandedly as he scrubs his face with army soap. "Now's an appropriate time to uninvite me."

To this, Atem stands firm.

"No. We're going to undo my deal."

"Ahuh-"

You said you wanted to."

The witch raises a soapy brow.

"I said lots of things, I said there was a war."

"No," Atem demands, "you wanted to. Because we're friends."

The Witcher stares at him for a minute, all furrowed brows and underwhelming thunder, then-

Then averts his eyes.

He looks for nothing around the room just like Atem would, settles his stare on his hands, stares at the floor.

Scrubs.

It's around the time when he's tipping Yugi's chin back and running the pads of his fingers over evidence of frostbite that Atem realizes his fingers didn't wilt and his skin didn't melt off his hands when he took the Witcher's rag away and dabbed the corners of his mouth and under the nose where blood is caked thickest.

Yugi handles pretty well - even takes to grooming, because that's where Atem chose to find comfort, and to spook him now would break more straws than Atem has left to bridge his sanity.

 Golden hairs get tucked behind a pale ear.

Atem's shirt gets tucked in by black hands.

"Right?" Atem says and fumbles with his hands now that there's nothing left to clean, finds no better place to put them than awkwardly over the Witcher's bony shoulders.

They shrug under his sweating palms.

Black hands try to stretch sleeves over knuckles.

He's ashamed.

Atem realized this long ago - knew it as well as he knew the horrors tar hands and mouth implied.

But the Witcher is ashamed, and behind them is a scorned town, and in the Witcher's coat is a phoenix feather that paid for it.

Marriage plots, territories... none of it was ever important in the Witcher's hut - and Atem suspects these things will never again be important after his acquaintance with this man, not even once he's king to a half-land.

"Look," Yugi sighs, and Atem has never heard him speak with this much annoyed sincerity weighing down his rant, "you're... not... hm," - he counts Atem's knuckles with a charcoal fingertip - "you aren't... significant. Your existence is really kinda brief at best. You would think I would," a loaded pause, "try to make your short life all happy and good since I like you and you think..." he consults the ceiling for the correct word," we're friends. I bet it makes sense to you that I should do something like that. And I used to try so hard for everyone, gods! A long time ago. I live in a shack in the snow in the North. That should tell you something."

It tells Atem nothing, just that it would've been best for them both if they never met at all, if Atem stayed in his castle and the Witcher remained cold and alone and unburdened with petty attachments because that's how he can remain ignorant of his own humanity.

And it's fair.

Atem knows that it's fair - that, after an eternity of it, this tiny witch is entitled to a respite from what he told Atem time after time is painful to him - that he's entitled to mercy.

And it's not too late for mercy - it's never too late for Atem to take off and run like he's got hell on his heels. And he does. In a very literal way.

"...hands off," Yugi deadpans once his tolerance of them expires, "unless you wanna find me a jar so I can pickle them. Want not waste not."

Atem removes them, and numbly insists that everything's fine and that they're friends.

Yugi wipes his face on his shirt, leaves charcoal streaks there. Looks around, at the trashed supply crate and their nest of bedding and the fire stove and arrow slits in the walls, considers all of it, considers Atem's furrowed brows and trembling knuckles.

Nods.

He's modest about it, but he nods.

And that's the end of that.


	28. 8

Can't use the road, it's a funnel for troops now that the mandatory quarantine ended and either a scholar or a mage agreed to come along.

Can't fight a rifle with a stick, and definitely not on foreign soil.

Can't stay if some stray tracking spell finds the Witcher - goodbye in advance, he says, because one wisp of dark magic and he's leaving the continent.

Atem smells a story here - one of the intimately shameful stories the Witcher would share in the stormiest of nights for reasons Atem never quite understood.

"Maybe," he says when Atem asks if he'll ever tell it. "Just enjoy the view."

Atem stares at the same wet tree that's been stalking them for a mile, enjoys a branch to the face.

"Breathtaking."

It's a bit unsettling to see how well Yugi is taking to the greenery and how hard he tries to stare ahead and look dispassionate.

His eyes betray him, his eyes catch on leaves and mushrooms and moss just like their coats keep catching on dead branches.

North doesn't melt, not that high up. White hellscape will mash months into years into decades, and suddenly there's electricity and telephones, and lavish living rooms and dirty jail cells - and weeds are the thing to excite the Witcher.

South, though. He's gonna love the real South.

"I'm gonna burn under your sun god," the witch huffs.

"Don't I have a permanent snowstorm on my ass?"

He rolls his eyes.

"That's not what I cast," he says, patient, then deadpans through a half-hearted lesson on exactly how witchery works, and why it works like that.

It's by the time he gets to tethering that Atem realizes he shouldn't know such things.

"It's... bad," he says quietly when the Witcher catches him trying to plug his ears shut. Hopes the rain can shush this whole thing - knows Yugi took offense.

Waits for his blood to curdle, almost shrieks when Yugi hip-checks him into a tree.

"I was saying," Yugi mutters and trains his violet stare on Atem.

There's no challenging that.

He struts ahead once he made himself very clear, leaves Atem to pick moss out of his scabs, throws brisk glares over his shoulder to make sure Atem's listening this time.

The path is difficult - and Atem counts every twig with his shinbones. It's all slippery logs and whip-thin braches. Mud, tree debris. Rain, and a rumbling hole in their stomachs.

Water rolls off the back of the black feathers, soaks into rat skins. Runs in little rivulets, runs heavy and tar-black and-

Atem catches up, frenzied, latches onto Yugi's sleeve and stays close.

He is permitted this. He takes what he can get, and the next stare the Witcher throws his way is just a touch kind.

He throws it - doesn't watch his step - and stumbles, lets Atem pull him back, takes well to being manoeuvred over a fallen evergreen blocking their path, and the ditch behind it.

And behind the ditch, a path rarely traveled except by the lost and the smugglers.

To their left though-

To their left, a better path.

And around it, an orchard.

And in the orchard - fruit trees, with little green apples on the low-hanging branches, wrinkled and probably sour as all hell, and Atem would die just to taste one.

Rain lets up, spitting a bit but otherwise almost pleasant, and the overcast sky almost - _almost_ \- makes way for the sun.

Atem looks on, and further down the easy path the apples are riper, juicer, and the gardens are rich and plentiful with fruit and promises.

"Oh _hell_ no," Atem groans an takes the Witcher - who's already well on his way into the orchard - by the shoulders and spins him to face rain and shapeless stumps straight ahead. "Respectfully, don't you even think about it."

Yugi eyes Atem's hands with a condescending stare but makes no indication that he wants them off his person.

"Why not," he says, "there's obviously some nice stuff that way, who knows, maybe a princess or a pot of gold."

"No," Atem begs, "please. One of you is enough...!"

"Heh," his witch says and drags him into lush greenery, and when he drops his hand to pluck a dazzling apple and pick at it with his fingers, Atem clings to the back of his coat and stays very close.

Soon enough - a log house in the meadow, tidy and overgrown with wild flowers, with white cotton puffs smoking out of the chimney.

The front door winks at them, opens.

...the Witcher's cabin was such a stellar example of subtlety that Atem isn't even sure what to do with _this_.

Cry, perhaps, when Yugi makes a beeline for the door.

He makes the mistake of looking back, and what was a fertile orchard from the front is charred willows from the back, with rare crow feathers tied as leaves.

Atem looks closer and gags. Apples are strung-up heads, bird and cat and whatever else dared to come here - and what the Witcher has in his hand is a rotten owl head, pungent and riddled with maggots.

And he's absently picking out it's eyeballs with his black fingers.

Inside the charming cottage, a kindly old woman sips tea from a saucer and gestures to doilies on her table with sweets on them.  

She's sweet and harmless and blind in both eyes.

"Not the most practical idea," Yugi tells her in a _been-there-done-that_ voice as he ruffles through doilies in her polished drawers. "With the eyes, I mean, if you only got one life and no real way to fix it."

Atem smartly hides behind the Witcher's skirts and touches nothing.

The old witch groans, slips some rings off her fingers - and her grandmotherly hut is suddenly a witch hut, unremarkable with its dead animals nailed to walls and weird shit in jars, if not even a bit barren.

Atem feels better now that it isn't all sugar and doilies, and she tilts her head his way, sniffs the air.

"Give me your boy," she hisses at Yugi.

Blood drains from Atem's face.

"No," says Yugi.

"Just a taste," she licks her craggy lips and reaches for Atem, "just a finger."

Her hands are scared and burned, stitched out of skins that don't quite match up. She has no fingernails, just smooth stumps, and Atem is so transfixed on the horror that he barely notices that she's got six fingers on one hand and seven on the other.

He squeezes the Witcher's narrow waist and glares at their hostess - not that she'll see him.

"Piss off, lady," he tells her.

Yugi blinks away from what was a doily and now is a hide overgrown with crystals. He's almost proud when he catches Atem's eyes, and the curve in his heart lips is almost a little smile.

And then he sees that Atem sees him, sees that Atem is almost returning his smile -  and so he grins at him, all wide and toothy and properly fond of Atem's petty bravery.

But heart lips curl up, and there are black gums there.

Yugi lets his grin recede a bit when he notices Atem's flinch, and they both look away, sober and just a smidge embarrassed.

It's a good day for them. One of their best.

"Hardly a day to be out," the hag spits into Yugi's general direction, "buy your stay if you won't give me the boy, or go chase yourself."

The Witcher's eyes go wide for a moment, scandalized.

"Rude," he as good as scolds her, "where's your kin hospitality?"

The hag snorts, leaks bile out of her nostrils.

"And what of your manners, cheat? I'd give it if you were traveling or inning," she accuses, "but you've got a dustshoot on your tail."

The Witcher rolls his eyes, grunts.

"Fine, yea," he mutters, caught by his tongue. "Still rude, maybe I'm the one they're dusting after and you should watch what you say."

Atem wonders what color her eyes would glow, if the hag had any.

And it's on the tip of his tongue though - whatever they're talking about - but he can't remember much of the day Mahad gave him a run-down of magician traps at royal disposal... except that it was the day he realized his first love was very, very _not_ light on his feet, and that it was also a problem that he was twice Atem's age and first in line to get 'Dark' stamped onto his title.

"It ain't you," the hag laughs at Yugi as Atem remembers he should be paying attention, "heard someone siced bear voodoo on the border town and made a fuss, what would a wic child know? Unlucky day to be out. Pay. Or get dusted on Magician maps."

"I know things," Yugi mutters and glares daggers at the witch - then glares daggers at Atem since the hag is blind and so someone else must be on the sharp end of his displeasure. "Voodoo got cast in a man, I heard, not bear."

She reels at the word 'man,' spits to her side.

"Bah!"

Her hands are a patchwork of too many skins and extremities, and her mouth is a sour, toothless hole.

But it's all wrinkled and decisively pink - and Atem has a feeling the next town over will have many children with just one hand running around, maimed but alive and well enough.

He also suspects that if she didn't carve out her witch eyes to be a sweet grandma for the kids, she'd take one look at the Witcher and his black everything and start praying to every god she abandoned.

The witch has a shed - and, after Yugi agrees to teach her something northern - theirs for the few days it will take the Magicians to decide there is nothing suspicious about two witches holed up together.

He leaves Atem to make room for both of them among bags of birdfeed and herbs - but mostly, he leaves to give Atem some space to nest and hoard sharp objects.

Gives him space to breathe, to make peace with every shadow and soothe every chill in the bottom of his gut.

There is little to fear here, except Yugi trading his limbs to the hag, and her sickly sweet glamour tricking them both with its homeliness.

"Do you wear glamour?"

The Witcher lets his weight settle at Atem's side before he answers, lets his little skulls finish clacking against each other like porcelain.

He leaves a generous foot between them considering how little space they have - and if Atem turns from his side to his back they won't have even that.

He does.

Finds Yugi sitting over him with his legs folded, staring at him.

Atem backs up as much as he can afford and finds a rake with his shoulder.

"I don't."

 Atem nods, minds his own business for a while, tries to sleep under purple glare.

"Don't you believe me?"

Atem doesn't know if he should.

On one hand, the Witcher would never waste magic, not on something frivolous. On the other, it's hard to believe anyone could solve immortality this young.

Not true - he didn't solve immortality for ages, Yugi mutters absently, and empires crumbled by the time he did.

"Waste of time, no one can afford it. Glamour is cheap, though. I understand why you asked."

Atem steals a sideway glance at the Witcher in the darkness, lets his eyes wander over his thick eyelashes, over smooth cheeks dusted with violet glow - and it's this dust that the Magicians are tracking.

Atem realizes he wants to feel curves under his fingertips, wants to check if it all feels as pretty as it looks.

Violet eyes narrow into slits and ever so slowly blink telegraphed annoyance.

Fear rushes into him, cool and familiar.

"I actually believed," the Witcher mutters like his suffering is endless, "you got over this nonsense. For days, I believed."

Atem nods his head yes - yes, he is very over it - feels his joints creak, all blocked and rubbery.

He's got a list of good apologies he can stutter through if he manages to speak - several escapes if his luck turns - and many things he can use to stab the hag if the Witcher decides one less finger will cure Atem of his 'nonsense.'

He ends up retreating under his coat and the flour sack he's using as a blanket, lets mossy darkness envelop him and keep him safe.

"I'm just so afraid of you," he whispers - whimpers - he doesn't know, doesn't really understand why he's even hiding; one irritated stare isn't in the top thousand things this witch ever did to stop his heart.

Perhaps because it's like a love confession, except his fear is something so obvious and tangible that Atem can taste it - and, sometimes, he thinks the Witcher can taste the ice in Atem's throat, feel how hairs stand on the back of his neck, smell the dread on him.

But to say it means to admit he can't scale the frozen wasteland of the North and just walk home, or that his leg will never again feel _his_.

"No tantrums today," Yugi smacks his blankets, "I've been on my best behaviour."

He's smug about it.

Right. Atem tells him it's only because his magician friends are looking for him - and what if there wasn't another witch hut in their way?

"You got me," his little witch rolls his eyes. "You have friends in high places, prince."

Atem snorts a little, rolls his sore shoulder.

"Ow. Your floor for a year would be better than two days in this creepy place."

"...we can always just leave."

Sitting up hurts every knob in his spine, and leaky roof drips right into his collar, but—

But what about the tracking dust, and—

"Yeah," Atem begins stuffing his bag, "I like having hands, let's  _please_ get outta here."

Yugi hastily hands him things.  

"...me too. Hurry up."


	29. 9

It's the horrors of the border town all over again - when they get spotted by patrol and startle the men about as much as the men startle them.  Bellies get cut open and stuffed with voodoo, tar rains form the skies - except only for five harrowing minutes, and only in Atem's imagination.

The Witcher just _goes_.

They tell him to move his ass and he goes, with their half-hearted insults on his heels and murder on his mind. And half-drawn scimitars at his sides - but one sharp glare, and the rudest man to step too close to a witch becomes the quietest, the most cautious.

"What's our charge!?" Atem demands, and he's the one to get shoved around for it since the only thing to dare touch Yugi is rain and strong language. 

They laugh at Atem. They're all strung up tighter than the Witcher might string them up, but they still manage to laugh, and even Yugi rolls his violet eyes to heavens - rolls them nearly out of his head.

Snorts.

Rain plasters golden hairs all over his face and washes away what little color he had in his cheeks. But rain doesn't bite the Witcher's lips cracked and flaky - it licks them red. They're red when they curl in ill glee.

They're the reddest Atem had ever seen them, and _hell_ , the damn Witcher has just the worst timing to get easier on the eyes.

"Fine," Atem concedes and almost rolls eyes at himself. "What's _his_ charge?"

To that, they have two questions for the little witch girl: where the fuck is she from, and what the fuck did she do to the border town.

Nothing, obviously - Atem snaps - look at her, she's too small for that. She's also not a girl, and no, she actually can't speak for herself - she's fucking mute, you asshole. And no, not a girl.

The Witcher remains absent from this pleasant chat - just drags his heavy feet through mud half-way in another world entirely, coughs dust into his sleeve, daydreams - and Atem spitefully gives up defending his honor.

Because in the end, it's Atem who gets the blunt end of his own men's disgust.

"Fuckin' disgrace," they scold him the entire way to the sheriff's outpost, "pay the fine, rich boy, and find something better to fuck, the hell's wrong with you?"

There's a hollow ringing in Atem's ears inside the holding house, and rain still hisses at him through moldy walls.

But it's dry inside  - and Yugi doesn't look too displeased with their lounging - and so empty jail with three rusty cells and a sleeping old drunk in the fourth seems like a quality place to spend the night.

They dump out Atem's bag, shame him for stealing army supplies, pat him down for knives and identity papers with heavy hands that get a bit lost looking for weapons around the curves of his ass.

They take his anklet - and he falls when his foot gives in under him because it's been so long that he forgot. He recovers though, passes it off as something or other, and they have no clue what it is that they've confiscated.

To Yugi, they say he needs to put his shit into a metal box, tell him to go inside one of the cells, leave the door half-open.

Shove Atem into an adjacent cell and lock him in. 

Leave.

There aren't any pained screams, not within a minute or an hour - and if the Witcher had brought unspeakable demise upon the men, their deaths are at least quiet.

Even the drunk stops snoring, either awake or dead of old age from how gray his hair was when Atem had caught a glimpse of him.

Atem loses track of the darkness around him. He can't tell if the black real or pretend until he wakes to an overflowing bucket under the leaky roof and knows he slept for hours.

His undereyes are heavy, but he can tell as soon as he wakes that rustling hay in the next cell gains a purpose and determination.

So he pretends his head isn't full of cotton and holds his breath, listens for dragging footsteps, watches colourful static in the darkness for any hint of purple.

He should've _said_ something, shouldn't have gone as mute as the damned witch-girl the moment he was left alone with him. Should've said something instead of waiting for the Witcher's invitation to speak.

What if something's wrong, he thinks through sleepy fuzz in his brain, what if he's done something wrong. What if.

Rust shrieks between iron hinges, hay carpeting gives way to wood, boots drag along it like a match against a striker.

There they are - violet pinholes piercing the darkness with their unfriendly light.

Familiar in the fresh tang of fear they leave in the back of Atem's throat.

Creeping closer - and Atem is locked in, and there's a door in the way, but what door? - the Witcher just opens Atem's door like there isn't even a lock, and the hinges shriek, and the hay rustles.

"You're breaching good faith," Atem mutters and makes no move to sit up from his floor bedding , or even roll out of the way.

But he offers a hand, and Yugi drops heavy - knees first, then stomach flat against the hay, right into Atem's arm like he's expecting a welcome.

Props his face with a hand after he settles in. Stares.

"I don't know what this is supposed to be," Atem tells him plainly, though he runs his fingertips along Yugi's neck. It's there and it's smooth, so why not? He's too sleep-logged and heavy to do much else, anyway.

His witch isn't talking - he just watches Atem solemnly. Dull light dusts his cheeks purple and kisses the bow of his lips, and his contours are all that Atem can make out in the darkness. He's kicking his feet in the air.

Nesting.

Nesting _ominously,_ even flashing a bit of teeth.  

"Are you angry?" Atem picks straw out of his bangs.

The witch just keeps grinning for a while - a long while - and stares at Atem with an objective admiration, like he forgot again that Atem is actually a sentient ingredient.

Atem fears for his fingers.

"How could you sleep like that, shouldn't you be more afraid of patrol or something?" Yugi finally whispers and kisses his vowels just barely, like he's trying to sell something illegal. "That they'll find out, or just stab you before asking questions?"

Atem takes care to pick his words.

"Just of you. They're good men doing good work. Please don't."

"Shh," the witch hisses through a finger over his lips - like the gray-haired drunk is some kind of respectable audience. Shakes his head at Atem, all tight-lipped, all _'shut up.'_

Pats Atem's cheek after he gets his point across, let's his fingers linger like he's back to stealing touches and pretending he isn't.

And Atem is supposed to pretend he doesn't notice.

So it's only fair that his witch should pretend Atem's fingers don't find their way under his collar.

That Atem doesn't unbutton his stolen shirt just enough to slide it half-way down his shoulders, or squeeze the tension out of them, or dip his fingers under sharp collarbones.

Yugi just leans back and stares at him. His teeth got a pearly sheen to them, all sharp and wicked.

Whatever the Witcher's got in mind, Atem won't be able to do a damn thing about it.   

"You know, I never said you could lend out my stuff," he leads, and licks his lips with purpose.

Atem swallows cotton and sawdust, and though his hands begin to shake, he keeps them busy working kinks out of Yugi's bony shoulders.

Keeps himself passive and yielding.

"I apologize," he says evenly. "I'll get your anklet back in the morning."

The witch finally flicks Atem's hands away and leans in, all purple light and shiny teeth against the near-blackness of their cell.

He's got a button nose and oily skin, and it's intimately uncomfortable when he presses them into Atem's face.

"No, you won't," he whispers so lightly that his words would be mute had they not bounced right off Atem's lips. "What if I don't wanna stay in jail 'til morning?"

"It-it's better. They'll put us on a train."

"Gotta come back, then. Maybe."

Oh.

It's a good one - it must be a good one, good summons, with clean magic and enough caveats to make Atem's brain hurt with things he shouldn't know once his witch comes back to him and tells him all about it. Because he'll come back to Atem. He must.

"What kind of summons?"  

"Hah," the Witcher huffs and fishes his mask from somewhere - probably his enormous coat with its bottomless pockets full of crap - and backs up just enough to slot it between their faces, to scrape its dirty wood along Atem's cheek.

It smells like a swamp, or driftwood, or faint mold that's homely and familiar.

Atem can't imagine ever washing the memory of it off his skin.

Can't imagine the Witcher just dumping him in jail the moment they got caught together.

"The dragon kind."


	30. 10

They ignore him and stomp their boots along grimy docks like he's some drunk passed out in the middle of the street - like this kind of thing is commonplace here.

Atem groans, curses the fucking Witcher under his breath, loads his fingernails with rotten wood as he tries to get to his feet.

There's still straw in his hair.

Fucking Witcher.

The air is salty. It's the first thing Atem notices after he blinks on the jail floor with lungfulls of hay aroma - and exhales here, into salt air and rotting fish and abandonment.

He gets up on his elbows first. Then his knees, his feet.

Some asshole trips over him and swears like a sailor - probably is a sailor - and stomps his way into a bickering crowd of men who should be loading ships and not ears.

Shit, did you see?

Sonova bitch gone and hired him again, I been tellin' you he might as well!

The Witcher, swear it's the Witcher.

Yea, I watch resources march. This night! Motherfucker. It bad karma.

Atem has enough of it within the minute it takes him to realize the sonova bitch who dumped him on his way to fucking work is right fucking there, inside that fake-as-hell Atlantis castle at very edge of horizon, and that Atem is not.

Dressed for a fucking picnic by the pirate bay is another thing Atem is not.

Or mobile.

Without the fucking anklet, his foot is wooden and as good to him as a peg leg.

It's goodbye, then. This might as well be the last he'll hear of Yugi - finally granting Dartz his fucking dragon after fifteen years - until the day the Witcher comes to collect this very town and many more like it as his fees for a bag of air he called a war and sold to an idiot.

Just like that egg he sold here and replaced with a baby the moment it hatched, and made a lord of a salt province into the country's favourite joke.

Maybe that's Atem's fate, too.

He doesn't think about it.

He thinks about salt air scrubbing at his face, wonders how a place so dry can still be so damp and rancid.

He ends up stumbling around like a beggar so rare in this part of South that a woman thinks it a kindness to show him the way to the lease market.

It's difficult for him to blend into throngs of folks with little green charms around their necks and proud people without them, all better dressed and better off - because pirate bays know no poverty.

The pirates don't understand it - but it must work, they think, and so they just shake their fingers at unsavoury lease markets and rent shops, and turn their shitty eye-patches away from southern things that took centuries to purge from the interior provinces.

 But not from here, not yet.

Atem didn't quite feel South under tree crowns and downpours like he does under the weight of salt air.

This is home.

(It begins to snow in the pirate bay.)

(How rare.)

There's nothing for him in this town except a lantern he steals from a shopfront and a wafer he buys.

And just like an abandoned dog, he finds himself back at the grimy docks where the Witcher had dumped him, wandering aimlessly along their slimy boards until his way runs out.

Then the sailors run out, and streetlights run out, and then there is just thick darkness and the crunch of dried barnacles under his boots, deceitfully razor-sharp under gentle waves of the rough shore.

Salt breeze brushes Atem's side, bitter in a way snow here isn't: snow kisses Atem's skin as it melts, and saline just prickles his sinuses.

It's black this far out, quiet - if it wasn't for Atem's three-legged march. It  would be stiller than the North, too, if the waves would cease their hushed rhythm.

There's nothing here - and nothing stalks him down the rocks.

It's a light echo to his steps when he first notices it, and he imagines cliffs and caves to explain away the phantoms in the dark.

But his echo threads on two stumps instead of three.

It's just at Atem's heel. Just behind him where he can almost feel it through the light shudder the thing traces down his spine, in every hair it raises.

Maybe it isn't a creature at all, Atem thinks. Maybe it isn't anything.

He frowns.

Grunts, even, but never gains pace, never whips his head back to witness a stretched ten-foot tall abomination with twenty hands and a feeding hole on each one.

He digs his heels into the rocks, stops.

It takes one aborted step more than Atem.

Fright licks the underside of his collar, sends him forward with an instinct to pretend he's mistaken and silly.

And  so he roots down just to be certain-  hopes the nothing would just run into him and be done with it.

An extra step - and the rock it unsettles hits the back of Atem's boot.

"Is it you?" he calls and learns this hollow shore carries no echos and no answers. Not even a breath of frost on his neck. "Whatever."

It gains pace when Atem least expects it, so close now, just at his side, brushing him with dozens of its phantom hands and kicking stones into is way.

It brushes the back of his hand with its grimy appendages, all damp and slippery and coarse.

Slides into every crevice of Atem's skin and clogs his pores.

Laces their fingers together, turns him right back to the city.  

Should've just turned around, Atem thinks. Pretty hard to miss the violet glow.

Thought he'd  much prefer the soaring phantom he imagined to the damn Witcher on his arm.

"Why bring me at all?" he mutters. 

South isn't just South - it's places. Beautiful places, colorful places, happy places, and the Witcher has managed to bring him to the worst of all three. 

"The Dart needs you to sign away the province so he can call his slaves what they are."

"And sell them to you?"

The witch hums.

"Five hundred of you in my home. Can't wait."

Atem doesn't miss the jab, but he can do little more than ignore it.

"I'm not signing away _people_."

"You're signing an independence treaty."

"I refuse," Atem says - and doesn't yet realize that the Witcher had no reason to come here at all except to shrink the half of South he is owed by one province.  Oh, how stupid of a boy Atem will feel then, how ashamed he ever doubted his saintly Witcher.

(Idiot.)

But for now, reason clings to him just like barnacles and crab legs cling to his boots.

Atem's healthy leg throbs, in his thigh where his weight rests with every lame step.  

"It didn't take much," Yugi warns, "to trick you once. I can do it again."

Splinters dig into his palms from how hard he grips his walking stick.

Many reasons drive his nails into the stick - mobility, dread, even entitled princely rage - but mostly it's to keep it out of the Witcher's filthy hands so he wouldn't poke Atem with it anymore just to see what happens.

"You can do anything you want to me."

The darkness has faded by then, bleached the black sea and the black shore and black sky to twilight gray - bleached everything except the Witcher's fingers.

"Careful, prince."

Atem holds his tongue.

Satisfied, Yugi yawns at him.

"Just take me somewhere I can sleep."  


	31. 11

The Witcher falls asleep in a brothel.

Just curls up on the first padded surface he finds - squints around in warning, and drops deader than Atem had ever seen him since he grew brave enough to look his way.

Atem always found disappointment in the North, even in the littlest things he only learned to appreciate once he lost his way to them.

Like rough bed sheets and miserable stories.

He had nothing better to like once he ventured so high into the Northern country that campfires would not burn to the soft whispers of fictional girls falling prey to Witcher's potions and promises.

They'd always disappoint him in the end, of course. Someone would always die under the Witcher's heavy hand - or under a train - or not at all, and be forever entombed inside a wall of frozen bodies in the Witcher's terrible castle.

But oh, the witch hunts he inspired -  how clever they were, how exciting. Atem still remembers how viciously they'd tease him with their almost-success, remembers the frustrated nights he spent just fantasising about slaying the monster that no one else could.

Atem knows better now.

Knows death sticks to his witch like oil, knows someone must've looked for the Witcher's heart with a knife and found triumph.

(Oh, what would he give to never learn that.)

(What would he give for a train.)

But maybe.

Maybe this time.

Maybe with a pillow, or a good crack to his sore neck.

...Atem is a disgrace.

It's just a man under his hand when he pats his witch. His hand doesn't fall off, and Yugi doesn't care for it - doesn't even stir under his dirty coat that he's using for covers.

Atem sighs. 

Maybe cheap perfume would rub off on him. It as good as soaked the bedding, so why not soak into dead rats?

He decides to leave his witch alone.

And anyway, the boudoir summons him; calls his name in a way cabinets and crates in the hut had called his name - and Atem goes to the boudoir with pent-up curiosity for a hundred witchy shelves he left unexplored.

This is a brothel.

He expects dirty pictures and oil and even pessaries because this is a lady's room  - and that's what he finds, right next to feathers that can't be hairpieces and items that can't be tubes.

Er.

When he finds them, he's tempted to help himself to the toiletries: what he sees in the looking glass inspires him to look away.

He picks up the menu next, thinks it's for food.

Smacks the menu back down.

Picks it back up and reads it trice, thoroughly.

Yugi wakes up sometimes, disgruntled and hissy with disorienting comfort he will _pretentiously_ regret later.  And it'd be so easy to believe the Witcher hides in his Northern hell to punish himself - and that he refuses himself the simplest delights because his dirt hands have no business holding them.

Atem told himself so many easy lies. This one would be insult to their entire affair.

The witch tosses again. Frowns in his sleep. No wonder: his hair is a pin-cushion for straw and forest litter.

Enough of this.

The fucking Witcher is getting brushed.

"Are you out of your mind," Yugi deadpans and stares at how polished and clean his fingernails look under Atem's file.

It's sunset.

Atem swallows through a lump in his throat - he knew this was coming the moment he found tweezers.

"I saw you biting them. So I thought..."

Yugi takes his tar knuckles to his ash face, feels scented lotion against his cheek. Frowns.

"I-I signed your thing," Atem tries. "You said to make myself useful, and I swear I didn't think you'd mind."

That changes the terms.

Yugi perks up, climbs over the bed and snatches the contract right up.

Blinks sleep out of his eyes - or perhaps he just can't believe them.

"What's this?" he demands. "You took two months to get out of my house."

That's because Atem intends to pay him, and The Dart very much doesn't, not with five hundred resources, and not with even one.

But Atem retreats to a chair and folds his hands in his lap, waits, knows all of this is good for him.

Watches the margins of the declaration of independence get folded over and ripped up in jagged strips.

Watches Yugi's penmanship.

"A word of advice, Atem," the witch tells him quietly as he scribbles his runes with manicure on his terrible fingers. "The things you really want to clean aren't gonna come off."

Water, chalk powder.

Roots of that plant in the corner, who cares what it is.

A plate - Atem gets him a washbowl - and things from the Witcher's pockets no one bothers to name anything more than "green rock" and "string."

It takes him far more effort to pen his spell into the margins than it would to just get a bigger piece of paper - but Atem has one good foot and really bad timing.

"Bring," Yugi hisses as he turns Atem's way lethally slow.

Locks their eyes, pins Atem to the spot with so many pins that his lungs turn into pincushions and pinch his nose shut.

The Witcher takes the washbowl full of things.  

And bit by bit - ever so slowly - lowers his spell into for no better reason than petty torment.

Atem eyes bulge.  

"Don't...!" he shrieks, "measure it...!"

"I told you how much," Yugi leers at him just as paper breaks the surface. "Let's see if you listened."

Nothing explodes and the world doesn't end - and Atem's life returns to him in gasps and staccato heartbeats.

Yugi's glare rolls, and there's black piss-water in the bowl when Atem dares to look at it.

"Good eye," the witch taunts and uses the bowl to mail Dartz his goddamn document.

Before Seto's apprenticeship, there'd at least be negotiations - with provinces declaring independence, that is. Now, he just misplaces all trade paperwork and forgets to answer their telegrams until they come crawling back. And then raises their taxes.

He never got along with the cousin, he offers to the next bit of wisdom the Witcher finds in brothel drawers among the things that are neither magical nor his. They never got along - and if Set sets out to assassinate him and take his throne, Atem would have to do a hell lot better than 'get along' with him.

The menu catches Yugi's eye.

"So you rely on your other talents?" he points to an entry half-way down the page.

"I telephoned him," Atem snaps. "He told me to go die."

"Oh, dear."

"He's half-way to the wetlands by now," Atem grits his teeth, exasperated. "He'll never forgive himself he said that - even if I ever come back, he'll never forgive himself. Well, _good_."

They were terrible together. It was a disaster every time his uncle visited with a budget proposal for one thing or another. And so one year Seto comes, and he's got his egg with him.

"And _naturally,"_ Atem says, "I wanna pat the egg."

Yugi begins to pick his way through hairbrushes. Yugi's listening.

"He says no way. And then I say, _'my daddy's the king, he's gonna make you give it to me forever,'_ and he thinks that if he can't keep his own egg, well. And so yeah..."

"And so what?"

And so Seto smashed it.

"We were very young," Atem says and relaxes his brow. "It cracked so bad. He kept it - maybe for shame, maybe because he never gave up trying to hatch it."

Atem still remembers Set when he saw him next - six years later and _itching_ , always itching and scratching and peeling his scabs like there was madness under his skin.

Seto wasn't unreasonably tall at ten - but he hit unreasonably hard and screamed unreasonably loud, and Atem's dad spent two weeks out of court just coddling him.

 _'Why,'_ Atem would stomp his foot and cry when his dad's door would only open for Seto. _'He doesn't feel sad about his father,'_ he'd scream, _'look at him, he doesn't even have feelings!'_

"And then, a few months later, dad gave him _three_ eggs, I was so jealous. Hatched them just like that. Protégé," Atem rolls his eyes and grunts. "They were so fucking majestic, wouldn't even look my way. So next time you talk about his prick, remember: the cousin" - he hisses - "is perfect."

He finds the Witcher sitting on the other side of the bed when he returns to the brothel from his sour memory trip.

"No," Yugi tells him carefully. "He killed an egg, Atem. Had he done it for magic, well."

He lifts up his tar hand, palm up, and shows what he means.  

Atem fucking _explodes_.

"HAA!" he spits. "You'd think! The fucker hatched her. Get this, fourteen - _fucking_ \- years later, he hatched a cracked fucking egg. I hate him so much."

The Witcher blinks at him a hundred times before he believes his own ears.

"Never mind," he nods, a bit wide-eyed and decisively impressed. "Your cousin would make a better king than you."

"Great," Atem frowns. He knows.


	32. 14 (?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHAPTER WARNING: this garbage chapter is exactly as intended

There isn't a story about the Witcher's good deeds, not even one.

He drowned a plague cure in a swamp when he could've saved a city, traded a magic box for a village he let waste away. Promised freedom to a child of Necrophades and never delivered. 

But not his time.

The Witcher will be known for a kindness he did at the salt town. He'll be known for how he saved it from being sold off by a fool with half-a crown, for how he tricked a slaver, and how he cleverly paid not one dragon for any of it.

Atem will make sure this dull tale lives - if Atem lives to tell it, and if anyone ever cares to hear its terribly uninteresting end.

...it's all kind of tedious, isn't it? No wonder no one ever talks about the Witcher's good deeds.

Yugi laughs at him.

Well, what? There must be other good deeds, right.

Yugi laughs harder.

(They will find them.)

Atem finally found him away from the shore, in the first grain of sparse woods, behind a field of cracked driftwood as bone-white as the snow is bone-white.

But what he found was longer than Yugi, bulkier. Its false hair spilled over a rock like spider legs, spilled like red blood spilled under his boots. Like rock chips and crab legs spilled and splattered at Atem's sides when the Witcher chucked stones at him - one, two, four - screamed nothing at him - and the Witcher is stubborn, so stubborn, so busy being angry at his pain that he forgot to be crippled by it.

(The rocks miss, all of them.)

"Don't wash your hands," the Witcher whispers candidly, without his mask or even a hint of ever being Yugi. "Bring me sticks."

Atem can't deny him, but he chokes up on the breath he didn't know he was holding once he wakes up from his stupor and sees blood - the Grand Witcher's blood - soaking his skinny princeling hands.

The witch can cut them off now if he wants them; he can have Atem's filthy hands after this. Atem doesn't want them anymore.

Salt air dries Atem's teeth through his parted lips, caresses his wet palms, ruffles hairs on Yugi's face when it leans in so close that their souls are touching and their lips aren't.

"Sticks and twine," Yugi kisses his vowels with his whisper.

(Atem doesn't want to know - doesn't want to remember any of this.)

"Like this," he twisted a cord around twig legs, smeared blood all over his stickman. He took Atem's hands into his black hands, guided them. "Wrap it left."

It was no bigger than his palm when Atem held his stickman complete. It wasn't measured or stuffed. It wasn't a straw doll.

It wasn't even a proper spell.

"Are they curses?"

Whatever they were, they looked no better when the Witcher made them. Dozens of them by sunset. Dozens of little stick people they made with twine and Yugi's blood, on a rocky beach that was definitely not a brothel.

(They will be burning Dartz in the town square when they'll find them, barricaded in a brothel by things rotten with good intentions.)

"No. This is goodbye," Yugi whispers falsely from behind his mask where he finds respite long hours after Atem talks himself into a corner furthest from the witch. The mask is his armour, the harlot's bed is his new throne. "Can't. Tried - you should know what that's worth, stupid. But that's the end of it, I _can't_."

He stays, in the end, convinced perhaps on no one's fault but his own.

(But he's helping - Atem pleads - Yugi's here because he's helping Atem because they're friends and because he wants to, because Atem washed him of his sins and shared his secrets with him and made him _good_.)

The horrible mask watches him with its hollow sockets, inspects his organs for shelf-life and his brain for damage.

The Witcher, he smells like bones.

Atem noticed it the day rain thawed the frost out of his feathers and washed the oil out of his tar skin. And  after they shook on it, Atem's hand smelled faintly like cattle bones fresh from the butcher, fetched to be fed to hunting hounds in exchange for pattings and loyalty.  

"You're just one boy to want things from me," Yugi whispers to him as he plucks feathers out of a cushion, "in a town I just made into slaves who'd want just one thing from me _and_ their new master. Same thing you should want."

Freedom.

It snows salt in a salt town, they say - but today it just snows snow.

Atem smells it before he sees it - feels its crisp bite against his skin, feels his hairs rise - and he knows it won't thaw against everything it touches. It will stick.

It's all powdered sugar behind the curtain when he looks. It's orange under dimming gas lamps of the morning, but it's snow, and he worries his lip almost bloody for how much he wants to watch the bonfire in the city square just to melt it all to hell.

"Freedom?"

His witch laughs at him unkindly, soft and uneasy against the shell of Atem's ear when magic carries his delicious whisper but keeps his body ten feet away.

"A head."

(They will not touch the witch girl a prince stole from the Witcher. When they find her, they will be courteous when escorting her to jail, and they will take good advice from the rumours carried to their ears from the border-town where this girl had brought with her the Witcher's wrath and vengeance.)

"Wait," Atem presses his nose against cold glass and squints into the night. "Wait, that's not a bonfire."

(And so the witch girl will run.)

Smoke billows through gray skies - another cloud amongst many, unremarkable and ordinary and made almost entirely out of ashy pieces of skin.

And it follows him.

Down the streets, down to the docks, thickest in his lungs northward where the wind carries it.

It's oily - the smoke is. Greasy and oily, with a hint of maple and burned hair.

Atem carries it to the rocky beach in his lungs.

Plays a cripple and a beggar and a fool, a stowaway from one of the pirate ships.

Crowds part for him and his shitty cane.

Let him limp his own way - away from the festivities in the town square where slavers are all lined up to pay their dues.

Atem would run after the Witcher, would perhaps help him over fences since he'd long suspected Yugi is in no physical shape to climb anything on his own.

But Atem is in no physical shape to climb the stairs on his own. An old woman helps him - another gifts him her old cane and stalks away with a brand new cane, all golden and polished and looted.

Barnacles crunched mercilessly in the black night Atem had spent loitering around this beach.

Not barnacles in the day.

They're crab carcases, all of them.

Rotten - or hollowed out by seagulls - with wide holes in the carapace of their cluttered bellies.

They crunch like salt under his boots, under his cane, under saline waves breaking against rocks.

Atem's lips have grown dry and cracked in the salt air within a day of his being here, and so he doesn't notice that blood touches them when he picks up a bloody pebble to sniff it for assurances.

Blood.

Red and still warm - and for a moment, Atem thinks he came to the wrong place because surely ( _surely_ ) it would be soot-black and reek of tar.

Seawater spits into his face, snow peppers his coat.  

(Atem knows he's going mad.)

"Mercy, hah. Never thought you'd give it to me, even if I keep begging you for it."

"I'm not," Atem spits and clamps his fingers over gore, "doing it!"

"I just want to go home, Atem," Yugi whispers to him softly through his bloody teeth - through his lies. "I want your mercy, and then I want to go home with your tongue in my pocket. Let me go—"

(home.)

Their home is glass air and shattered glass on the floor, gray instead of gloomy shades of crab legs and wetlands.

Brilliant light scoops his eyeballs with put of his brain with a spoon, no more stench of rotten fish, no more salt.

(That's not what happened.)

The door lays some ways from its hinges, and the shutters on one of the windows are ripped right off.

And on the wood floor, rolled out like a carpet for their bitter return to the Witcher's hut, is snow.

Fresh and fluffy, high in the doorway and speckled sugar all the way by the dead fireplace.

And in it, paw tracks.

Huh.

And then the wind howls, but there is no wind. Atem's stomach growls, but he isn't really hungry.

And in the open doorway, wolves.


	33. 15 (?)

Death comes for him as Seto told him it would - as fight he can't win, one he joined in a bout of reckless and misguided valour.

Jaws snap at his witch, and that's all it takes.

Atem pushes him out of the way, puts himself between the witch and the wolves, screams at them. Their awful maws might as well quarter him - and Yugi might as well send the leftover fourth to his family so they would have something to put to rest, except the Witcher is many things, but he isn't wasteful.

They're a blur of yellow teeth and steel pelts - the wolves are - and only one bothers going for the kill. The other goes for a feast, stressed for food and skinny enough to try to eat the meat right off Atem's leg before the first one can ever maul him into the death's mercy.

A maw snaps inches away from his face, treats him to the rotten stench of a scavenger - because pride and majesty has no place in the North on any creature no matter how grand.

He hears his bones snap before he feels them crushed, feels splinters pierce his leg from the inside. The maws shred him, yank his elbows from under him, and the teeth that want his face break free. No fingers, no face, no leg, torn to pieces and devoured - that's how he'll leave this world.

Fangs the size of his toes close around his wrist and crack bones –

Thunder cracks, splits the heavens.

A kettle whistle pierces his eardrums all the way through -  but the weight of the beast isn't nearly as crushing as its jaws. He shoves it off himself, feels hot blood soak the fur.

His leg feels like a soup of splinters and meat, and it's duller now that there's no new pain to cripple his senses.

Above him, the Witcher's rifle smokes.

The angle's awkward, and Atem supposes it's hard to miss point blank -  but it would've been much easier to aim down and just shoot them both and be done with his vengeance.

The second wolf lingers in their doorway, not sure about the thunder or why its mate isn't moving - and Yugi's dropping another bullet down the trapdoor and aiming way too low.

It nicks more of his floor than the wolf, and the beast whines and hauls its three-legged self the fuck out of here.

The Witcher can easily go after it's lush pelt and a week's supply of soup.

Instead, he goes to Atem, all barefoot and bare-kneed, all trembling.

Drops to his knees, pats down Atem's wounds and squeezes him unkindly.

Ties a rag tight around knickles, knocks their foreheads together, and all Atem lives for are Yugi's steady breaths and his breathtaking eyes, eyes that flame out and light dust on fire - enchant with their iridescence until Atem is breathing the Witcher's air to the Witcher's rhythm. 

"Hurts," he mutters through chattering teeth, "good."

They're sitting in a pile of salt, Atem realizes. The soft kind of salt - soft like ash - the kind that bites his skin before it melts.

He doesn't understand.

He doesn't understand - but he screams at a little bird skull under his chin, claws Yugi's awful rats and feathers, tears it off himself with ashy hands, throws the nasty thing as far as he can.

Gets smacked for it - doesn't care, keeps screaming at black hands that bleed just like his hands bleed, move like his hands move.   

"Will you stop," the Witcher simmers into his face and rubs salt into his wounds, turns Atem's charcoal skin back to a healthy brown. "It's dirt."

It's _snow_ , they're _home_.

Atem doesn't understand.

But Yugi does - and Atem is content to just be.  

"It's all too much for you, isn't it. Tsk, boy..." the witch sighs at combs through Atem's bangs. "Give me the rest of my clothes back. Can you do that? Try."

He nudges a laundry tub his way before he goes to sweep up the snow and props the door back in place with a cabinet once he sees that Atem can still function. He's pleased with that, at least. 

"I asked. To come back here," Atem tells him numbly, "home. I asked you again."

The Witcher has lit everything there is to burn by the time he gets to him, now dressed in nearly everything he owns.

"...right?"

"Maybe."

Maybe.

Atem scans Yugi's frozen drapery and shattered jars, feels familiar needles in his throat, remembers the cold, remembers scratches in the floor and furs he'd use for screaming at nightmares.

"...I don't want to be here."

Like a forest fire, the Witcher cackles.

Laughs - tips his chin to the ceiling and laughs to the ceiling gods, all covered in ash, all black-mawed and sharp-toothed and fucking _gleeful_.

Takes one look at Atem.

Laughs harder.

It's then that Atem remembers his mauled leg, and meat-grinder pain rips a scream out of him.

"Please," he hisses, "just don't."

He's got Atem between his thighs by the time his mean mirth runs out - cleaning out his wrist and _bitching_.  

Atem remembers the North not by its cold, but by how warm Yugi's thighs feel around him.

"Hey," he pats one with bloody knuckles, appreciates how it's got pants over it where just ten minutes ago it had none. "Hey, did we fool around... or something..?"

Yugi pauses.

He still holds a gauze over Atem's wound, but slowly - ever so slowly - inches off his lap as if he thinks the slower he moves the less Atem will notice he was there at all.

His eyes are sharp, but their glow is almost gentle.

"It's just that. I had your clothes - and you, well. Kind of didn't."

"We did nothing like that."

Atem nods, swallows.

Reaches for his fur quilt - it's exactly where he left it, misted and damp now, but familiar.

His fingers just won't close around it.

Yugi gets it for him in a half-hearted manner he'd leave his things in a mess he'd expect Atem to clean, idles with the fringes of bandages like he needs to burn something out of his mind.

"So I'm calling it," he cringes like he wants to puke, "...even. We're even. I'm letting it go."

Letting go _what_ , letting go like the jailers had let him go, and so he runs from them, heavy in his feathers.

The charms in his little rat skulls jingle a like a rainstick - like a warning.

It's common fucking courtesy to stay in jail, same as it's fucking courtesy to leave the doors unbarred, and oh, the guards are courteous - the guards don't lock the doors, the guards don't _touch_.

And the witch girl runs from them, on foot, through high smoke and salt winds.

Runs from Atem, leaves him and ignores his warning, how dare she.

...Atem shoots away from Yugi's heat like he's burning, drops onto his knees before the rat coat like it's some foul god to him, rips out every stitch the witch had put into him, screams at the pockets.

A snuff bag falls out of it softly - and he thinks hard drugs inside should fall harder - until a lead sphere drops the hardest and heaviest right through the bottom of his stomach.

"-shot you, they shot you," he hears a voice not unlike his own screaming at the bullet like it had committed an atrocity. "You _ran_ and they _shot_ you in the _back_ and I'll hang them, all of _them_ , how dare they."

How dare they have a gun, how dare they shoot it.

He doesn't get an answer - his witch just watches him with a patient eye.

There's a lie brewing behind his clever teeth.

"And _you_ ," Atem hisses at him, but he's never sure what to do with his rage when it concerns the fucking Witcher. "You need a bandage change!?"

Yugi cocks his head, stares.

There's ash in his eyes. 

"I, hmm," he muses, "no, I healed it."

And what did Atem fucking _pay_ for it!?

He doesn't ask, _doesn't understand._

Doesn't know what to do with himself after that.

"What you'll do is beg me to redo your arm again, and then you'll clean my house _where you are a guest_  , and you'll remember your manners."

"What's the point," Atem spits. "It'll get infected all over again, fuck this, what do you want, more of my kingdom? A candy bar, a drawing of Seto's cock? I can't draw!"

"Well," the witch stares at him - stares at Atem's lips and licks his own. "Maybe it'll be fine. I won't pack it with dirt this time, so there's that."

Atem wants to burn him. 


	34. 16

It won't be long, now.

"Gets worse," the Witcher slurs almost cross-eyed, at something to the left of Atem where wolf meat and ancient baby limbs hang from the ceiling together, in harmony. "And worse after that, and worse again."

They drink.

"Maybe stop being a cunt."

"Maybe," he says.

Drinks.

Reaches for another - but no, it's Atem's, all of it - and so his little fingers curl around air.

They're black, his hands are. It seems a mundane thing.

"Give," grabby hands demand.

"Tell _me_ a secret" is the price they must pay.

They ball into fists, pick at brittle skin around the fingernails, spin and spin.

Atem drinks from the rim this time, and it helps forget that Yugi's secrets are ever only horrible.

Drinks. He'd lost the taste for it - lost his taste even before he had lost count - but the hooch burns good from the inside.

Yugi, turns out, doesn't take kindly to being teased with moonshine he sold for a smack on the cheek. 

"Secret!"

"About your clothes!" Yugi concedes and chews his blackish smile. "Always did wanna burn them, you know? Finally."

"You," Atem takes offence, "wear a _polo_ neck."

 Yugi snorts at him, then pulls his collar all the way up to his rosy cheekbones.

"Imean, youshouldstop wearingclothes."

The only thing that doesn't get worse, it seems, is Atem's mastery of the pen - and every bitter shot only improves it.

"Perfect, see? Like this - no, I swear it's like this! But even _better_."

Yugi's eyebrows climb with every stick and every stone.

"You only think that 'cause you miss it."

"Am not. No, yes, I am - I do, of course I do, are you not seeing what I'm seeing? - but I'm right and, and you know what?" Atem makes his point with a null between fingers. " _Yeah_."

Yugi laughs and snorts and splutters, but in a charming sort of way Atem thinks he could watch forever.

He flips the majestic pillar upside-down, for space.

"For size," he names his impressive second masterpiece.

They snort together and spin together - everything spins -  and Atem vomits only blood come morning, every morning.

"Any ache?"

Not even in his tender heart.

Atem has a hole in his stomach, in his dreams.

He can see right through it to the other side of him - and on the other side the Witcher pulls at his veins like strings.

"Then order me around," Atem spits when he can't take anymore of the _kindness_. "Want some blood for a spell? Want me to warm your bed?"

Yugi wants both - and he packs his pockets full of bones and purpose for an ominous minute it takes him to talk himself out of giving into Atem's taunt.

He chooses to walk it off, in the end.

Chooses to go to his summons when the book he throws at Atem almost lands and Atem almost tells him he's almost proud.  

Atem finds his plate fuller than it should be every day.

And every day Atem sees the Witcher work his fingers to the bone trying to forget that--

\--that he made a friend and then made a prisoner.

South, huh.

Hell would freeze trice over, they say, if Witcher ever truly leaves the North.

But he had a lisp, see - whoever it was that carried the saying up the railroad.

Hell would freeze trice over if the _winter_ ever leaves.

But there is less winter in the North, less of it to sweep from the Witcher's porch, less frostbite to nurse under indoor mittens and dry lips.

Atem sleeps with one eye open - but tonight he sleeps with two.

Dreams of a stain on the wall and places that aren't here - and heat.

In the dark - when he deigns to come home at an ungoldy hour - Yugi can find his footing just barely. Looking for spies won't cross his mind.

So Atem spies.

Yugi is down to half his size, with flat hair and flat furs. Treading water in his boots, dripping.

Between the trees, his silhouette was something to behold, something that cast as much magic as it cast fear - but against the dull glow of ambers, all the Witcher casts are thin shadows.

He drops his coat, drops his sweaters, his pants.

But that soaked undershirt... it lingers. Maybe he caught his fingers on the hem, or felt Atem's eyes on his belly - but he slides gentle fingers along his shoulder like it's his first time with himself, and Atem knows this moment isn't meant for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i came back from the dead to bring u this dick joke


	35. 17

A hand darts out into the cold, snatches a shawl - and a small witch hops right out of his own cauldron like he thinks he can beat the frost - like ages of living here have taught him the only kind of heat he can find here is in a good witchhunt.

There's a spring in his every step, haste to keep the warmth in - but the shawl ends just short of his knees, and-

And bathwater still runs in rivulets down the length of his legs, traces curves and outlines--

The witch freezes - perhaps even half-literally - with how raw the frost must be pinching his thighs. 

Keeps still, back to Atem, tight in his shawl.

Well.

He's got a point - Atem made a habit of spying.

It's too cold to stand like that, Atem tells him, he should get dressed -- but thighs spasm under nippy frost and it's just so hard to wish clothes onto him.

He doesn't turn under Atem's coat, and not under his gentle hand on his shoulder.

But maybe to fingertips under his knee.

"Stupid," he finally deigns to glare Atem's way. "Stupid boy."

Atem's eyes roll out of his head.

Fine.

"First of all," he _pinches_ his way up a thigh, "I am the crown prince of South. And you know what? While you're at it. Don't " - gets to the front of his thigh now, and oh so very high up - "call me 'stupid'."  

And smartly, he stops just short of where it counts.

Says, "you should get dressed, it's cold," and struts away.

The damn witch didn't even want it - but now that he won't actually get anything, he's irritated.

"You treat your cousin like that?"

"Hah," Atem snorts like it's the most obvious thing, "oh _yeah_."

Set's (cold and unwelcoming) embrace (that he must perform at public functions) is too distant of a memory, now.

A memory he relives in his daydreams - and relieves with day drinking.

He feels Seto like a phantom limb, like lonely persons do.

It's nostalgia for what never was: being held and holing, and hot skin against skin, and sweat under his teeth - and not speaking for weeks, and breezy mornings on the floors of palace verandas, and still not speaking, and fighting on every letter of every word, and still not speaking in the stables with straw in their hair and bleeding lips.  

Missing dear cousin Set is a bit like missing a paper cut.

...and then there's _this_ asshole.

 "Did you think this through," Atem says - or hopes he says, but his tongue is as knotted as his brains that have all but boiled out of his skull and left him burning, and stupid, and irritated.

Drinks - if only to make sure that this glass, like the glasses before it, burns his throat just as little.

Yugi coughs through the afterburn and goes about his business.

"What?"

He's been rummaging around for the better part of the day, squirreling musty rags away, and junk against walls and into corners.

It was one just thing he needed to find and pack away, but now it's a thousand - and each one Atem picks up with vague curiosity is just a smidge to warm to the touch.  

He told Atem to do the same - and Atem has so little left to his name that it fits in one pocket of a coat that isn't his.

"Don't hang on to that," Yugi had snapped at him when he saw that Atem had kept the drugs. "And quit drinking. And wear your coat, it's cold."

It isn't cold. Atem all but snorted then, and he snorts now when he sees that he has a chair and the witch doesn't.

"Off," Yugi throws in passing.

Curls his lip when he doesn't get what he wants.

"First," Atem reclines.

"My chair."

"It's tank-en. Get another one."

"You burned my other chair."

There's nothing warming Atem's lap - but there could be. He leers at what could be there, looks at all the parts of him that he likes, pats his lap where Yugi's name is written.

The hut screeches, cracks.

Yugi's eyes are slits of violet.

"You," he grits his teeth, "got too comfortable. You may _not_."

Atem fucking _may_ \- and Atem does - drags him closer under the knee and grabs himself a handful of, well, about five layers of underpants, but it's the thought that counts.

Squeezes.

He hears the crack.

Hits his head against the back of his prized chair.

Recoils, off-balance, stands - taller now, angrier, gets his fist ready - and instead punches through the bottom of his own gut, rips strong bones out of his knees.

He's too big for his own skin, suddenly - suddenly no better than scum on the bottom of a witch shoe, suddenly unwelcome. 

 _Woah -_ he screams in his head - _contact hex._

Yugi is a crumbling edge of a cliff. He's black water, he's wine from an enemy.

"Oh--" Atem holds up an open palm.  "No. No thank you."

He needs to sit down.

"I need to sit down."

He drops - his back won't bend, and his wide eyes won't stop wandering.

"Oho."

It's warning through rusty bars of a jail cell, nasty and proud and distant - but what a warning, ha!

Ten steps away, with his heels against the wall and eyes as wide as Atem had ever seen them, the Witcher wobbles, huffing.

He looks young.

And scared, and stupid, and _real_.

And in that moment, Atem is every bit of Seto he could never stand.

"Go!" he spits at Yugi's tracks in the snow, "run from your own mess!"

He goes straight for the feather coat after he slams the door, drapes it over himself for however long it takes him to fell too warm under it, and limps back to his chair.


	36. 18

"When it rained lizards? Ten years ago, just about. Stuffed my pockets full of them, but by the time I got home there were just tails left."

A chuckle is all Atem gets.

"No."

"That whole year when the stars never came up."

"No."

"Spoiled crops."

"Occasionally."

"A hundred pregnant virgins."

Yugi chews his lip.  

"Yea. All me."

Gets smacked for it - liar.

Pays no attention to Atem wiping the heat off on his feather coat, just lets whatever is bothering him lead him around a hefty bag of oranges in circles.

"Ash," Atem thinks he hears when they briefly lose sight of the bag.

"What?"

"Dust?" Yugi frowns at the idea of his lessons being wasted, "we had tracking dust on us, you remember?"

"Oh," he peels his eyes off the fruit which he'd much rather be peeling instead. "Right. No, yeah, I just remember..." - he picks a petrified finger from the floor - because this is the sort of place that has loose fingers lying about - and sticks it onto his hand as a sixth ugly digit - "...the lady."

The Witcher, whom Atem had seen bite into a live squirrel, cringes at the memory of her.

"So what, they found you?"

From how much of the black gums he sees in Yugi's toothy scowl, they might as well have.

He still scowls as he crouches next to Atem, ass deep in the snow, and holds his hair out of the way.

Blood comes in two colors in the North - black, when the dusk drains what little color and sanity remains in this desolate palette, and ruby-red in the white-out. Pops like unfinished jewels against silk, even smells like scrap metal on a mock crown.

"You will cry for me," Atem spits the last of the blood - misses the snow and ends up spitting red onto his own bare feet. "If I'm dying, you'll cry. Do you understand?"

Yugi tries to answer with a heavy shawl over Atem's sweater, but Atem will have none of it.

"Do you understand?" he demands.         

It's by the time they're back inside and he is climbing out of his sweater that Yugi deigns to speak to him.

"...you're fine."

So they sell medical degrees, do they, now?

Yes, apparently - and scurvy medication is the kind that heals the soul. It tastes like Mahad's life lessons on the lip of the river, where Atem had offered an orange and a kiss to cure a stranger's snake bite.

It has a sound, too - a juicy crunch between his back teeth, a bit like the whipping his nurses got for first losing sight of the prince, and then abandoning him when they saw his new company.

Tastes like summer fires, and growing taller than a table, and first love.

"Summer fires," Atem mouths around his orange.

"To put out, yeah. A few times."                      

He never wanted a good answer, and getting one ruins Atem's ability to stand this little asshole for even a moment longer.

So he doesn't - he leaves. 

...Yugi finds him by the track marks in the snow, off the garden path and northward of the North - out of the Witcher's territory and past the balding evergreens where supposedly nothing but death awaits Atem should he run this way.

He can't run with his bum leg - but spent his days carving himself a staff far more ominous and impressive than anything Yugi owns _out of spite_ \- and so today is the day just doesn't come back for lunch, and that's that. 

"Wrong way to run away," Yugi mutters, winded from jogging and just a little bit too pink.

He should be bringing his wrath down upon everything. But instead he snaps - like a branch under the snow - and then snaps upright again like he remembered that he's a malevolent creature.

"I'm not running away," Atem says into his scarf. "I'm looking for whatever's there."

"There's nothing there."

'Nothing' is a pile of pikes and scribbles on the horizon, and the closer they walk to the end of the world the more it looks a hell of a lot like a shipyard.

The deep North is full of treasures, he heard everyone say on his journey for a dragon - and you need no fear of death or gods - just a shovel.

It was just a day north of the last railroad when the discarding of things began. Pots and pans at first, then bags of memories to keep their homes in their hearts on their stupid journey.

Then his guards' weapons became too heavy, then their wallets, their sick and elderly.

But never _ever_ the shovels.

Atem remembers thinking that maybe - just maybe - the North wouldn't be full of treasures if no one came here to throw theirs away.

A meal is the real treasure here. And a fire to warm him in the night, and good company.

Curiosity had put a shovel into Atem's hand on his first clear day at the Witcher's house, long before the mask came off.

Picked a spot at random, and found jewels much easier than the bottom of the snow.  

Buried it back, of course -  lest his host thought Atem was stealing from him.

Ships, though.

Atem supposes the Witcher's bottles are no place to store ships.


	37. 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yooo look at these arts!!
> 
> [Kudalyn](http://tunafax.tumblr.com/post/164879308984/kudalyn-and-the-fever-began-to-spread-from-my) & [Kurapixel](http://kurapixel.tumblr.com/post/164347874457/owo-whats-this-skldfj-tunafax-i-lov-eyour)

 

"There's-nothing-there," he makes a face at his feathery company and makes a beeline for something modest.

And for her modesty, her bow is grand.

Frozen in time by North's fury, as grand as she was on her maiden voyage - even abandoned by the centuries - the ship slants on one side, buried except the masts and parts of the decks, beautiful.

Well, then.

Atem doesn't ask the Witcher why his home isn't a captain's cabin.

His answer is in frivolous things and useless things, too large and too bulky to salvage - though the things Atem knows are the heaviest for Yugi come in sets of two.

"We stay the night?"

They stay the night - spend it shovelling keepsakes from the sailors' bunks and stripping walls for firewood.

His witch finds him funny, giggles.

"What?" Atem turns and finds himself alone in the frozen gallery.

"You're setting them off. Come here," Yugi calls to him, just far enough from the source of the giggle to light a fire under Atem's ass.

Next time he hears it, he's got an eyeful of violet-dusted cheeks. They don't dimple, they don't even move at all.

They don't laugh - but someone is sure as all hell laughing.

"It's fucking haunted!"

"It's not" - Yugi pries himself out of Atem's grip - "haunted."

"Then-- the hell?"

"Let's see," says the witch and surveys the walls. "It should stop; you're welcome here."

The damned ship just laughs at them.

"Um! You Are Welcome Here?" Yugi tries again a whole octave higher, and it's his turn to cling. "Prince Atem..? This Is My Old House please-make yourself-at-home?"

They must look like fools - to the... to the ghosts.

Fools.

"In My Old Home," Yugi adds for a good measure. "Where you are welcome. Because I, the owner of this house, Welcome You Here."

They count minutes in sweat beading on their foreheads.   

"What's wrong with you!" Atem smacks him with his coat when nothing happens, and Yugi drapes the discarded garment over himself like want-not-waste-not.  

"What? Thieves. The hex - the _ghosts,_ Prince - scared them off, but fire is brave. Never quite smoked me out," he adds unpleasantly. "Got the whole ship yard cursed, though, by vengeance. With the..." - he waves his gloved hand in the air like he thinks Atem should know what he's talking about - "...with the cold. Now I can't live here - but the joke's on them, they all froze to death at the half-way point."

The hull is buried - all but the masts are buried, and this ship is as much a mausoleum to poor housekeeping as it was never meant to be a house for one.

And, like the rest of the North, it's silent and vast and monotonous, and Atem wanders off toward the first shiny thing he sees.

Cranes his neck - animal bones hang from the deck beams, nailed there with smaller animal bones.

There's nothing here for him except demon idols with wooden eyes staring at him from stanchions. 

And Atem could swear one of them just moved.

He spins - and long shadows dance to the flutter of his torch.

Nothing followed him down here, it seems - and whatever this 'nothing' is, it managed to step on every creaking board on its way.

Subtle.

Turns again - and faces an idol hunching over him.

It gawks at him through carved eyes, so close that Atem can smell icy decay on it.

Was that there before?

He takes his eyes off the thing for a moment - and now he's sure it's grinning.

Waves a hand at it - and the 'nothing' behaves like any statue would.

"If you say so," he says to it, steps around and carries on picking his way through whichever crates catch his, eye until charred floorboards almost give under him and he can go no further.

He finds Yugi hoarding jackets in the mass hall, nesting in them for the night, blind to cabins and a whole dormitory of bunk beds. 

"If you want privacy," he gestures vaguely in the direction of supposed comfort  - and maybe he's the one who wants privacy because he finds his way to Atem half-way through the night.

He doesn't know what he wants.

He negotiates his weight in pitch darkness, blinks himself in and out of existence, and appears at his side just when Atem thinks he finally fucked off.

"It's me," he informs with a breath, and Atem supposes he should feel relieved it's _him_ and not any other idiot with  _glowing_ fucking _eyes_ paying him a visit on a ship a million miles away from the nearest town.

There's a breath of fingers whispering against his cheek once they find it.

Against his lips, his neck.

He must think Atem is asleep, and Atem has half the mind to let him live it down.

At least he's gentle, at least his touch is soft, ruffling his sweater and pressing into his lower belly.

Darts—

"Excuse me" - but Atem has him by the shirttails - "Have you lost something?"

"Let go."

"I would, on any other day."

"Let." he hisses, "Go." and drops heavy at Atem's side once he's free.

"Now apologize."

Atem's gut clenches pleasantly when he hears him do as he's told.

"Well. If you're done with the power trip," says Yugi to a dirty image of him on his knees that begins festering in the back of Atem's mind.

Thinks he's excused, and gets dragged back down, by the waist this time.

Collapses like a rag doll, slumps.

He's heavy.

"What's with you?"

He just nudges against Atem until they're both tucked into the corner all and he can use a knee as an armrest. Settles in - and grinds a bit against Atem's crotch as he settles.

Atem sighs into his oily hair.

"I rather like our house," he says.  "Don't feel like _this_ about it one day, alright?"

"How would you have me feel?"

"When I'm dead? Like stars," Atem whispers, "and fate, and gods."

"Like immortality that no one can afford?"

"Can't they?" Afford it? Not the stars. Not immortality.

Jackets whisper around them as Yugi feels around for his hand, finds it, and brings Atem's knuckles to his lips.

"Not even a finger," he says and kisses each one.

"We should fuck," Atem decides.

"We should."

They don't.


End file.
